Manga

If you have room on your shelf for ONE MORE omnibus series, make a little room for Dark Horse's just announced omnibus series for...

Streaming anime service Crunchyroll is getting into the original webcomic game with a new “Crunchyroll Originals” program, and it kicks off with HYPERSONIC music club by artist Hiroyuki Takahashi. The story line involves world of tomorrow young cyborgs fighting a mysterious conspiracy led by monster girls. Just a day at the office. Takahashi's work is a mix of manga and music influences, and his work has a colorful explosive effect just right for hidef computer screen.

by Zachary Clemente Way back in the early 90s, Nintendo Power published a serialized run of The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past limited comic series....

Junji Ito! Junji Ito! Junji Ito! Japanese horror master Ito has been avoiding the genre of his greatest triumphs—Uzimaki, Tomie, Gyo— for eight years, but...

Americans can't get enough Tezuka! Well sort of. The Japanese comics pioneer was as prolific as he was influential and recently we've recently seen a pretty ambitious attempt at getting a bunch of his works into print here in the US from DMP. But a lot of primo Tezuka's work was already published here via a series of very attractive volumes published by Vertical which ranged from Black Jack—perhaps his most accessible series and one of the best known—and standlone volumes like Ode to Kirihito. Sadly many of these books are out of print, but not to worry, Vertical is bringing them back in digital form:

The other day we reported on DMP's new Kickstarter which hopes to publish some untranslated works by Osamu Tezuka but as a pretty hefty price: $360,000 to put out 20 books, and stretch goals that go all the way up to $589,000 for all 31 volumes. Understandably, a lot of manga observers have questioned this amount and the reward tiers— for instance, when this all started the lowest amount you could pledge to actually get a book was $150!

Manga isn't all awkward schoolgirls and giant robots. There has long been a very strong alternative and literary thread of manga, and two recent articles give you some perspective on it. I would call Ryan Holmberg's Proto-Gekiga: Matsumoto Masahiko’s Komaga a must read, but I have to confess, it is very long and involved, and I have set it aside for weekend reading. BUT the important thing is that he compares and contrasts Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who is kind of credited as the father of "gekiga" or realistic manga, with Matsumoto Masahiko, a figure who appears in Tatsumi's autobiographical A Drifting Life under another name. Masahiko's work went down a slightly different path than Tatsumi's but Holmberg shows that it was equally important:

Digital Manga has been successfully Kickstarting publication of several books by God of Comics Osama Tezuka for a few years now. So far they've done Barbara, Swallowing the Earth and more. But Tezuka drew some 150,000 pages of comics in his lifetime, so this is a pretty big task to bring all his comics to English. The new project has ambitious goals: to publish the following titles:

I know we've been slacking a bit with 31 Days due to the horrors of New York Comic-Con, but it's full sped ahead to the pumpkins now. And here is the best thing you will hear today, tomorrow or possibly in a lifetime: Japanese Horror master Junji Ito Is doing a Pokemon collaboration. Yeah that's right. The creator of Uzumaki, Museum of Terror, the Long Hair in the Attic and much more, is doing POKEMON. The news was announced in Japan as a "Collaboration," you know, like Tokidoki doing Marvel, except terrifying and unspeakable. It's called “Kowapoke,” which means “Scarypoke” and a single phone wallpaper image has been released thus far. That's Banette, cute little Banette, admittedly not the nicest Pokemon, now all Kowapoke'd up. T-shirts are being given away in Japan now because life is unknowable and terrifying.

Neon Alley's Viz'z free streaming media platform, is adding a bunch of choice Sailor Moon,  Sailor Moon Crystal, Bleach, Naruto Shippuden, and Ranma 1/2...

  by Zachary Clemente While at SPX this year, I was able to grab a quick word with seven amazing cartoonists about their work in Hana Doki...

According to a French press release, and Google translate, manga master Jiro Taniguchi will be one of the main guests for the 42nd Festival...