luffyonepiece
• The Examiner reports that Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece is about to set a record for the biggest first printing ever for a manga in Japan with 2.85 million copies of volume 56 of the series.

One Piece Vol. 56, which will officially go on sale on December 4th in Japan, will eclipse the previous record for first print runs of 2.63 million copies set by both One Piece Vol. 27 and Vol. 55, according to Seikei News. One Piece reportedly has approximately 176 million total copies of its books in circulation.


Published since 1997, One Piece is the best selling manga of all times. In Japan it’s been adapted into 10 movies, a 400+ episode animated TV show, video games and anything else you can name. Despite being a perfect example of episodic storytelling, with a vibrant, memorable cast and endless supply of invention, the published version hasn’t caught on quite as well as Naruto here in the US — maybe because the version of the anime that aired here was so heavily edited and badly dubbed? To be fair, it’s hard to imagine the original airing unaltered on Saturday morning cartoon TV…luckily they don’t have Saturday morning cartoon TV anymore!

• In his always scorching liveblogging of Previews Chris Butcher mentions the amazing Seven Miles a Second by David Wojnarowicz and James Romberger, and flushes out the information that an expanded edition exists without a publisher via a tweet for Calvin Reid:

>@calreid: I think I Can answer. Reid & Reed planned a new revised edition of Seven Miles A Second, which was completed but has never been published. Reed pulled the plug on the imprint before we could pub. The new edition has about 20 new pages. I hope someone publishes it.
I think Seven Miles a Second is one of the great comics memoirs and an important record of David W. & of a seminal time in NY.


Ya hear that, publishers? A seminal, award-winning expanded edition of a comic by two respected arts figures without a home!

Simon Jones reports that he’s ending the eroto-manga anthology magazine Comic AG with issue 110. Today’s publishing model made it more work than it was worth.

Comic AG is still breaking even, but that doesn’t mean it is without cost… it takes time and energy to put out issue after issue. So it was still a drain on our resources, if not financial, then spiritual. With each release, we were slowly marching toward an event horizon, a place of no return, where we’d have to ask ourselves the hard question: is this worth it? The answer is “no.” The answer was always “no.” The variable was when we’d reach this conclusion, not if.

4 COMMENTS

  1. I’m really sorry to hear about Comic AG. I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but Simon Jones is one of the classiest people I dealt with in comics, so I’m sad to less product coming from him. I’m sure there’s more info in the link, but I don’t wanna get fired, so I’ll check when I get home :-P

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