Miyazaki working on a samurai manga, post retirement
Revered animator Hayao Miayazaki announced his retirement from moviemaking a few months ago; his final (we think) film The Wind Rises has just opened...
31 Days of Halloween: Akira Toriyama’s COWA! and seven other new digital series from...
Viz had been plugging along with its digital comics available via Viz.Com and their app they just announced eight new series. Including one by...
Webcomic Alert: Bani Garu, Lea Hernandez’s history of Gainax
BoingBoing has just introduced a new webcomic and it's a doozy: Bani Garu, a history of Gainax Studio, the legendary Japanese animation studio. There's...
The Beat Podcasts! More To Come – DC’s 3D Cover Woes
Straight from the offices of Publishers Weekly, it's More to Come! Your podcast source of comics news and discussion starring The Beat's own Heidi...
Otakon news: Monster is back, show moves to Washington, more licenses
As we mentioned a post or so back, Otakon, one of the biggest anime/manga shows on he East Coast was held this weekend in...
Katsuhiro Otomo, Nobrow, and Japanese fashion house Comme des Garcons collaborate
As a comics fan, it's always nice to see the medium get wider recognition from other fields, although perhaps not as surprising in the...
Kickstarter Watch: Osamu Tezuka’s THE CRATER
For fans of the ever prolific "God of Manga" Osamu Tezuka, we can thank our lucky stars for publishers like Vertical/Viz/Dark Horse for providing...
Here be Monsters: new Guillermo Del Toro manga TV adaptation in the works
Some seriously appetite whetting news via Deadline: HBO have teamed up with none other than scare master extraordinaire, Guillermo Del Toro, to adapt Naoki Urasawa's 18...
Convention Watch: Doj-Con at Dundee
In non-Saga related news, the number of conventions in the UK continues to rise with smaller events around the country becoming even bigger and...
Nice art alert: PEPITA: Takehiko Inoue meets Gaudí
Okay here is a thing which is cool: PEPITA: TAKEHIKO INOUE MEETS GAUDÍ a hardcover travel diary comprised of prose, sketches, and artwork by Takehiko Inoue, creator of SLAM DUNK, REAL, and VAGABOND. Inoue, whose sensitive pen and ink drawings are gorgeous by any standard, went to Barcelona and became entranced, as so many do, by the imagination and beauty of the architecture of Antoni Gaudí which lies over the landscape of Barcelona like a surreal lace scarf. culminating in the still unfinished Sagrada Familia, the famed twisty, turny cathedral that unites the gothic and the modern in one stunning building.
Must read shocker: There is still a US Manga industry
Brigid Alverson shows us how it's done in this comprehensive report on the state of the US manga market. The big shock is that despite sales shrinkage since the boom years, it's still a relatively stable market:
