By Mat K.
At first glance, as you run down our new release manga section on our website, the week looks interesting but with a couple exceptions (like Detroit Metal City Volume 4), overall not too exciting. But then you get to the bottom of the list and you have to blink twice because your eyes can’t quite make sense out of what you think you’re seeing. Stephanie Meyer has invaded the manga shelves! That’s right, the Twilight Manga Volume 1 has arrived. Now the cover merely states “Twilight The Graphic Novel”, though distributor listings actually say “Twilight Manga”. And the adaptation is done by Young Kim, which would technically make it manhwa anyway, but I digress. I know this comes as good news to many Twilight fans out there. You finally get to see your precious Edward in manga form. And I will say this, the cover art doesn’t look terrible. I suppose I’m just glad that Shakespere and the Bible made it to manga form before Twilight did.
And now that I’ve said that, I’ll say this: apparently, we’re not allowed to sell the Twilight Manga until March 16th. Apparently they just shipped it out a bit early to tease us all.
Now, big news in my book is the arrival of a new Yuu Watase series (if you’re not familliar, Yuu did Fushigi Yugi and Ceres: The Celestial Legend). Her new series is Arata The Legend, and is her first venture into shonen books, as opposed to her usual shojo stylings. Basically in a world where humans and gods coexist, Arata is the unfortunate successor to the matriarchal Hime Clan, unfortunate because if he’s not cross-dressing to hide his gender one minute, he’s fleeing for his life the next. Fun times. Watase does the celestial gods and humans thing really well; reincarnations, genetic clones, living stories, and alternate worlds. She’s always fun, magical, action packed, and sad.
This week also sees the release of the first Bakugan manga (Bakugan Battle Brawlers Evo Tournament Volume 1). It’s one hell of a long title. I know those of you who’ve been across our shelves must be wondering “But I know I’ve seen Bakugan books in the store, what do you mean the first manga?” Well, those books, those tiny tiny books are actually “animanga” a term used to describe digest sized comics made up of screenshots from the animated version. Basically, they take images from the Bakugan cartoon, cut/paste them into a digest book and add speech bubbles. So yeah, the first REAL manga is finally releasing, with drawn artwork and everything.
There are a few other things of interest coming out this week including new volumes of Code Geass: Nightmare Of Nunnally, and Gantz, not to mention a couple new yaoi books, which I know seem to have been a little dry in their releases lately and it kinda sucks, hopefully they will start picking up the pace now that it’s spring time.
That’s the news I have for you all this time around, so see you next week!
Ja Ne
