Category Archives: Series: Manga Widget Investigates

Manga Widget Investigates looks at licensed titles that have yet to be released in the USA, and gives readers an idea of what to expect from the title.

Manga Widget Investigates: Tzusuki wa Mata Ashita

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It’s been a while since I’ve gone snooping around the internet for license requests, but it’s a new year, and a time to get back into the business of blogging.

The recently passed Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, and New Year seasons are a time of celebration for many people in the United States, and a large part of these celebrations is spending time with family. Having spent a lot of time with family this past holiday, I started to think about manga that focuses on the relationships between family members. Some of my favorite manga published in English focus on family dynamics (Cross Game and Bunny Drop come to mind) and while these books are probably not the most monetarily successful, these series have been critically acclaimed, and are always series that I make sure to have copies of at my home (and promote tirelessly!).

After a bit of digging, I came across what looks like a real gem – Tzusuki wa Mata Ashita (つづきはまた明日, To Be Continued Tomorrow) a manga about the Fujisawa family, which consists of a 5th grade boy, a 1st grade girl, and a salary-man father. The mother in the family has recently passed away, and so the Fujisawas gets by with the help of the father’s younger sister. The story starts off as a new family moves into the home next door, and the neighbors look remarkably similar to the Fujisawas. It seems like a very remarkable story, and having recently dealt with the pain of losing a family member, the idea hits close to home.

Tzusuki wa Mata Ashita is written by Kita Konno and published by Gentosha. The series is currently at 3 volumes and counting, and is currently published on Gentosha‘s Web Spica, which honestly, I’m going to have to learn some Japanese to understand exactly what’s going on here, but it looks like an digital platform similar to www.sigikki.com. I’ve been pulled to this site before on the account of beautiful watercolors and other artwork, but I still haven’t explored enough to know exactly what is going on. More reasons to become bilingual, I suppose.

Kita Konno is not a widely known writer in the USA, but has written a mix of josei, shojo, yaoi, and yuri manga in a mix of anthologies. This mixed pedigree makes a me even more interested in her work, as some of my favorite authors (Natsume Ono, Fumi Yoshinaga) have the same type of mixed pedigree.

As far as publishers go, I am not sure if any of the publishers have a direct relationship with Gentosha, so perhaps someone like Yen Press might go for this title, or perhaps this might be a great candidate for Digital Manga’s Kickstarter crowdsourced publishing. (I believe that TOKYOPOP had a licensing relationship with Gentosha, but unfortunately, TOKYOPOP is no longer publishing manga. Probably.) It appears that the parent publishing company has done some work with digital comics, so that might be a good home for Tzusuki wa Mata Ashita, so either JManga or NetComics take note.

While manga about families suffering hardship and coming out of it together may not sell a lot of comics to the Naruto crowd, it has the appeal of a more independent, adult comics-reading audience, and as the manga-reading population ages, this sort of content may be a good step in that direction. I would love to see manga like this in the United States, and I challenge publishers to redefine the meaning of manga with titles like Tzusuki wa Mata Ashita.

Manga Widget Investigates: Toribako House

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With the release of Bunny Drop‘s 4th volume last week, I’ve been thinking about Yumi Unita again, who I think has one of the most distinctive and beautiful styles in published josei today. Her use of line, pattern, and white space is different from most of the comics I’ve seen published, and I think that it is criminal that only one of her series has been published in the US (major props to Yen Press for picking up Bunny Drop, even if it is on a fairly slow release schedule). Also news – it looks like Unita is writing a Bunny Drop sequel that focuses on the story before the time jump that’s supposed to happen soon (I haven’t received my volume of Bunny Drop from my order yet, so I don’t know if the time jump happens in volume 4 or 5).

This week I’m looking at a two-volume Unita series called Toribako House (トリバコハウス), published in Shodensha’s Feel Young anthology in 2003. It focuses on an early-20s woman named Miki who is living with an older man. She has a real aversion to people being in her personal space, and comes across a guy who is brash, rude, and is all up in her grill. It is these sorts of situations that Unita derives her comedy and great story-telling situations, so I assume that this would be a great read. Apparently there are some darker tones to this series – threatened abuse from Miki’s boyfriend, perhaps – that apparently give it a darker feel at some points, but I suppose that’s what reading the book is for. The metaphor is a bird in a gilded cage, as evidenced by the cover art for the first volume (check out those shirt patterns!)

Unita has a style that I find expressive unique, and delicate, and unlike other shojo or josei, focuses more on the characters themselves than the places in which they interact. Her expressive facial features and varied character composition are highlights to what I consider a very excellent style of illustration, if a bit unconventional.

Toribako is a two-volume series, so not a big investment in funds – Yen Press could have it in a one-and-done omnibus (which I think I would prefer over two volumes, although I would certainly pay for two), and I wouldn’t mind reading it in digital if I had to – it looks like it lines up well with content from Digital Manga or NetComics, although I assume JManga could get the digital rights as well.

Toribako House looks like a cute series that could possibly stand on the line between shojo and josei, and could easily make it to the US because of its small size. Who do I have to beg to get a copy of this?

Manga Widget Investigates, MMF-Edition: Katsu!

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Hey folks! We are postponing this week’s Rescue Me! post in lieu of a MMF license request. Please check back in next week for more Rescue Me! content.

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As hopefully you know, this week is the Cross Game Manga Moveable Feast, a monthly celebration of manga that lasts an entire week. For May, we are celebrating Mitsuru Adachi’s critically-acclaimed Cross Game, a Shonen Sunday manga published from May of 2005 until February of 2010. Derik Badman is hosting the MMF at The Panelists website, so check back there every day this week for more Cross Game content. Cross Game is 17 volumes long, and is being published in an omnibus format in the USA – seven of the 17 volumes have been released so far, the first translated omnibus volume consisting of the first three volumes, while the second two omnibuses are two volumes long apiece.

Mitsuru Adachi is a sports writer, primarily. He has worked in other genres, such as history and fantasy, but his major area of expertise is sports manga, which is why we haven’t seen too much of him the USA until now. Being a sports manga writer is sort of a kiss of death in the publishing industry in the USA – manga like Prince of Tennis and Eyeshield 21 are not popular in the USA, even though they do very well in Japan. This difference comes from the  audience differences between the two nations – in Japan, manga is for everyone, and caters to people of wide tastes and hobbies. Shonen Sunday and Shonen Jump target kids in junior high and high school, and manga in Japan has a much higher penetration rate than here in the USA. And, to be blunt, many of the people who read manga in the USA are not sports-oriented, and don’t enjoy reading about sports.

Cross Game has shown us that even when an author focuses on a sport, they can still manage to tell other stories. Adachi is especially adept at de-emphasizing action and the very meat-and-potatoes scenes that make most other sports manga tick – instead, he focuses on character interaction and emotion, and lets the reader fill in the blanks when it comes to action. It’s a very slick presentation that features a sport, but does not emphasize it above all other things.

Despite his perceived limited scope, it is my opinion that Mitsuru Adachi is one of greatest mangaka in Japan, rivaling Rumiko Takahashi in skill and popularity. His work is allegoric yet heartfelt, and maintains a pace and scope of storytelling unmatched by other mangaka. It seems like a tragedy that more of his writing has not yet made it to the USA, and I think that this is a problem that Viz Media and its parent companies need to rectify, so I’m making a suggestion for Viz Media‘s next Adachi release – Adachi’s 2001-2005 series Katsu!.

Katsu! is a boxing manga about a young man, Katsuki Satoyama, who joins a boxing gym to meet a girl Katsuki Mitzutani that is in his freshman class. After training a bit and sparring, he finds out that he has a latent talent for the game – and comes to discover that he is the son of a pro-boxer. The series features Adachi’s signature every-man main character and the feisty female co-lead who gives him headaches, but this time framed around the sport of boxing.

I’m sure that other people interested in Adachi would like to see his other major baseball series, H2, released in the USA, but I think that Katsu! is a much more reasonable series – like Cross Game, the series does not break 20 volumes (Katsu! is 16 volumes, Cross Game is 17). Both are more modern than H2, which ran for 34 volumes from 1992 to 1999, which isn’t necessarily a problem in art style, since Adachi has been pretty consistent with his art for the past 25 years, but I doubt that many publishers would want to start printing a 34-volume baseball epic that started print almost 20 years ago. Katsu! is a fine compromise and showcases Adachi’s ability to write about more than just baseball.

Part of what we doing an MMF is celebrate not only the story being told, but also the writer telling it. I think it is high time we let Adachi loose on American soil and get more of his manga translated into English. The stories are riveting, wonderful examples of how excellent comics can be, and Cross Game is only a taste of what he can offer to English-reading fans. Katsu! is a fine next step, and it is my hope that Cross Game does well enough to make other Adachi series viable for print in the US.

Manga Widget Investigates: SOIL

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This week, I thought I would take a break from shojo and josei about complicated and beautiful women and look at something a little more… different. This week has been a bit surreal, so I thought it might be interesting to look at a manga that is also a bit surreal.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet SOIL.

Published in Enterbrain‘s Comic Beam, SOIL is a psychological mystery by Atsushi Kaneko, a mangaka influenced by the punk movement – it represents his second major foray into the world of alternative manga, the first being Bambi and Her Pink Gun, a 6-volume manga also published by Enterbrain and picked up by Digital Manga Publishing.
Apparently, the book did so poorly that it only got two volumes published in 2005 and 2006, and was subsequently dropped by DMP. While I have my own theories about why the series didn’t succeed here in the USA, David (Manga Curmudgeon) Welsh loves it, so that really should be enough for anyone that reads this blog.

SOIL follows two detectives who report to the mysterious disappearance of a seemingly normal family in “New Soil Town” a pleasant, idyllic community where nothing is what it seems and everything is a lie. The main character, a fidgety young woman named Onoda who seems to lack social skills is paired up with an old pervert who likes to smell his own B.O. and play with himself during their work on the case. It’s a bizarre combo, but these characters don’t seem to be the type you connect and empathize with; instead, (if Bambi and Her Pink Gun is any indication) Atsushi Kaneko creates characters that are both true to life, funny in their compulsions and habits, but darkly accusatory and often terrible people. It makes for very interesting reading.

The art style of SOIL is what makes it one of the most visually interesting “Manga Widget Investigates” series I have ever looked at. The dark, bold lines that create the form of the illustrations on each page are something I would expect from Western indie comics or something out of AX, and I think that’s the selling point of a series like SOIL. This could easily find a home with any of the indie books publishers like Last Gasp, but it also could easily be a part of Dark Horse‘s seinen/CLAMP specific line that includes books with similar violence and content. I feel like the market is growing for this type of story – as mainstream comics start to expand and become something a bit more than tights and abnormally large breasts and new comics readers especially branch out to things like books like Demo, Daytripper, and even things like Locke and Key, alternative manga has an interesting role to fill in the coming years. I imagine books like Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service will make the way for things like SOIL, and that’s an especially good thing. Or, all this hopeful thinking is a complete pipe-dream. One of the two.

SOIL started publication in 2004, and ran for 11 volumes, had its own TV drama, and represents a type of manga I very rarely request but also could be a bridge between mainstream comics and the manga community. And, it’s probably damn good reading.

Manga Widget Investigates: Oishii Kankei

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One of the series I’ve really been enjoying lately is DMP’s Itazura na Kiss, which is one of the manga I associate with the beginning of shojo as we know it in the USA. The series, although only recently licensed for release, has flavored and influenced multiple series released in the US, and forms part of a background of almost “required reading” if you are interested in the progression of shojo as a genre. It also happens to be a wonderful series, so it isn’t a drag or a purely academic read either.

One of the things that sets Itazura na Kiss apart from most shojo that is being published currently is its art style, which some might say is dated or old-fashioned. The art is fully set in the 1990′s, with all of its clothing and hair trends, but it also has a sort of angular quality that looks very different from something like, say Fruits Basket. While some readers dislike this style, I find it quite attractive. 1990′s manga like Itazura na Kiss, and Boys Over Flowers are some of my favorite series; it comes as no surprise then that I’m interested in another 90′s manga – Oishii Kankei (A Delicious Relationship) written by Satoru Makimura and originally published in Shueisha‘s Young You anthology. The series is 16 volumes long, and began its run in 1993.

Oishii Kankei is a story about a college age woman who loves gourmet food named Fujiwara Momoe. Her father, a wealthy businessman, loves to indulge his tastes for classy cooking, and she has spent her entire life eating the most delectable meals prepared by the best chefs in Japan. On the day of the celebration of Fujiwara’s graduation, her father dies of a heart attack, presumably due to his overeating. In one moment, Fujiwara’s life is forever changed. Now she and her mother are alone, and must now make a living. Fujiwara manages to walk into a small French restaurant and impress the manager and head chef, Oda-san, to hire her.

This is, just like Itazura na Kiss, a shojo tale of grumpy, handsome love interest vs. spunky, relentless lead, but it is complicated and embellished with food and cooking. I’m not shy about asking for cooking manga, and the list of cooking manga we have licensed in English is woefully short. To take cooking and add the irresistible strengths of Itazura na Kiss just seems like a winning combination to me.

The rest of the world seems to agree. Oishii Kankei has been made into an 11-part drama show as well as a 20-part Taiwanese drama titled Sweet Relationship which ran from Fall 2007 to Winter 2008.

Of particular note, Satoru Makimura is an author we haven’t seen anything from in the US, but she produces some seemingly spectacular dance, clothing, and sport-related josei and shojo manga. She made her debut in 1973 with “Shiroi Tsuioku,” and her latest series, Real Clothes, serialized in YOU, has made it to the BookScan comic lists for Japan on multiple occasions.

Do I think that Oishii Kankei is a good license? Probably not. The series’ “outdated” artwork is probably a limiting factor for its publication because of the tastes of the current US manga reading population, but that doesn’t make it any less wonderful. Certainly though, it is a possible license – books like Boys over Flowers and Oishinbo have been published, so it isn’t out of the realm of possibility. Regardless of discussions of financial viability though, I can’t think of a series that meets more of my “squee” criteria besides perhaps The Drops of God (coming soon from Vertical Inc.!!!) so I guess a guy can dream.

Manga Widget Investigates: Barakamon

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My birthday is on a Monday this year (March 28th if anyone wants to get me something!) which means new comics are released the day after my birthday. That means that I get a late birthday present from Yen Press – the third volume of Bunny Drop by Yumi Unita will be available to purchase on the 29th. I have been looking forward to this book for a while now, so I’m glad to get my hands on the next volume. What does this have to do with Manga Widget Investigates? Why, the subject matter, of course!

Bunny Drop is a manga about an adult man and his interactions with a young child. Yen Press has multiple series (Bunny Drop, Yotsuba&!) that fit into this odd category. Since Yen Press has a corner on both the “adult men and their fatherly interactions with female children,” as well as the corner on all of Square Enix‘s titles, I thought I might look around for another series that might fit into their catalog – and have I found it. This week we’re going to look at a manga series called Barakamon.

Barakamon is a slice of life manga written and illustrated by Satsuki Yoshino about a haughty young calligrapher who goes into self-exile after attacking another calligrapher who criticizes his work. After arriving at a small rural island, our protagonist meets all the island folk and settles into a life of “country living.” He meets a little girl who is spectacularly interested in this new stranger (and of course, using his house as a fort to play in), and apparently drives a lot of the humor of the series. His acclamation to this environment and his befriending of the local children and families is the source for what I am sure are antics galore.

Barakamon is currently published in Gangan Online, and online effort that Square Enix is doing, and was originally published Gangan Powered. Interestingly enough, the Gangan anthologies are a source for much of Yen Press’ material. Barakamon, in Gangan Powered, was published alongside content like Hero Tales, Higurashi: When They Cry, Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime, and video game-inspired titles.

Currently the series is available online, and you can read it (in Japanese) at this link.  The more information can be found (and presumably run through Google Translate, if you are so inclined) at this link.

As we get into license announcement season, I’m keeping Barakamon on my list. It looks like a fun and cute slice-of-life comedy that is similar to Bunny Drop, and Yotsuba&!, which, if you think about it, is probably the best praise I can give a series.

Manga Widget Investigates: I Am A Hero

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(This post has imagery that may be NSFW.)

Last week I finished up looking at Kodansha’s initial list of releases and found them to be… boring. Now that I’m finished looking over what is actually going to get published in the US, it’s time to daydream about manga that hasn’t been licensed yet. Since I am a sucker for manga award winners, and since they generally are less formulaic, more unique pieces, I’ve been daydreaming about the list of Manga Taisho nominees that was announced in January. My first delve into the Manga Taisho awards explored the world of Un Chocolatier de L’Amour Perdu, a josei manga about a pâtissier and his unrequited love, which sounded absolutely delicious. Going back to the Manga Taisho list (of which you can find a very nice synopsis here), we are going to look at one of the darker pieces of work that was nominated this year – I Am a Hero, by Kengo Hanazawa.

The Manga Taisho awards are sort of the odd man of awards given to manga in Japan. Unlike most manga awards, which are generally chosen by editors and mangaka, the Manga Taisho awards are chosen by booksellers who are in charge of selling manga in their specific stores. The Manga Taisho awards are also limited to works published in the year that the award is given, and can only be given to a series that has eight or less volumes. This means that the Manga Taisho awards generally promote newer work, and keep industry behemoths like One Piece and other shonen giants away from the limelight. The Manga Taisho panel also has the tendency to skew towards manga that are more eclectic and mature than normal manga, so you tend to see more seinen and josei series than shojo or shonen (although Bakuman did get nominated for the 3rd Taisho awards last year).

I Am a Hero is a psychological thriller/horror manga that features a 30+ year-old man who is working as a mangaka’s assistant and is trying to make it big with his own series. The author has some severe psychological problems, but he tries to overcome them and live a regular life. Things take a nosedive when a rampant virus which initially looks like the flu starts turning people into crazed zombies, and the world starts collapsing… maybe. From what I can tell, it seems fairly contentious whether or not the zombies are real, or if they’re part of the main character’s overarching psychosis.

The author of I Am a Hero, Kengo Hanazawa, has published a total of four series. His longest running, Boys on the Run, was a 10-volume series published in Big Comic Spirits, and seems like a mix up of Rocky and I’ll Give It My All… Tomorrow. Likewise, I Am a Hero is currently in print in Shogakukan‘s Big Comic Spirits, which is a weekly seinen magazine that is/was also the home of Oishinbo, Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit, and Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga. That’s quite a bit of variety, and the series currently being published in Big Comic Spirits seem to relish that.

I Am a Hero is reminiscent of some of the much darker work of Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service illustrator Housui Yamazaki. Both Mail and MPD Psycho published by Dark Horse in the USA immediately come to mind for their dark, disturbing horror. While I Am a Hero is published in Shogakukan‘s Big Comic Spirits, I have a feeling that a series like I Am a Hero could only gain traction in Viz Media‘s Signature line (which does feature Biomega, a sci-fi horror manga) or in Dark Horse‘s excellently curated manga line.

Manga Widget Investigates: Bloody Monday

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In this episode of MWI, we are back to looking at series Kodansha has announced it will  publish during the summer of 2011. Last time, we looked at Cage of Eden, a shonen survival thriller with lots of fan-service. This time, let’s take a look at another manga that started its print run in Weekly Shonen Magazine, and will be part of Kodansha‘s arrival to stores in the summer of 2011 – Bloody Monday.

Bloody Monday is shonen crime thriller – the main character is a young hacker who uses his talents to bring down unsavory people and criminals in the underworld. His father is an agent of an elite anti-terrorist government agency, and occasionally the main character gets to work on hacking and decrypting jobs for them. Because, you know, this shit actually happens in the real world, and junior-high and high school kids get consult work from shadowy government agencies.

The plot focuses on a terrorist organization that is trying to apparently destroy all of Japan, using biological warfare. This organization is both covert and overt in its actions, and concurrently frames our young hero’s father for murder and places a female operative into the student’s school as his new teacher to keep an eye on him. This is an interesting plot point, because while we can see the main character working to track down these terrorists, we also get to see him interact with the antagonist of the series as if she is an ally. Depending on the writing, this could be very interesting plot construction, or it could be absolutely awful.

This series will undoubtedly draw comparisons to Death Note, a very successful manga from Viz Media, and this is almost assuredly why Kodansha has decided to bring this title along with its first batch of new manga series. The idea is almost exactly the same, although in Death Note, the main character was actually the terrorist, which is the opposite of Bloody Monday. What made Death Note interesting was the way that Tsugumi Ohba wrote her intelligent characters. The major reason why Death Note was a good read was the way that these intelligent characters were put into situations where they could be intelligent and do some creative problem-solving. Whether or not Bloody Monday catches fire like Death Note did in the US will be up to the first volume and whether or not the authors of this series can create interesting space in which intelligent characters can interact.

One of the problems I have with manga like these is that the intelligent main character needs to remain the same intelligence throughout the manga. It is one thing if he or she gets stumped by some various problem, but it is another thing entirely if the character is brilliant in one moment and mind-blowingly stupid in the next. While Death Note was good about this in the beginning of the series, there were some instances, especially near the end, that made me wonder why Light was so… dumb. I’ve seen rumblings about Bloody Monday that this sort of thing is a frequent occurrence, which could spell doom for the series if its major fans are those who like smart mysteries.

Bloody Monday is obviously at least a bit successful in Japan, so it must be doing something right. The series started publication in 2007, and ended at volume 11, and has now started a second season, much in the same way that Rosario + Vampire started a new season after ten volumes. Bloody Monday Season 2 is up to three volumes, and is currently serialized in Weekly Shonen Magazine.

Whether or not Bloody Monday makes it to a second season in the US depends largely on how well this first run does, and we will find that out when Kodansha releases the first volume in August.

Manga Widget Investigates: Un Chocolatier de L’amour Perdu

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The Manga Taishou executive committee announced 13 nominees for the 4th annual Manga Taishou awards, and while every entry in the list interested me in some way, none of them made me perk up like Un Chocolatier de L’amour Perdu (also known as Shitsuren Chocolatier or Heartbroken Chocolatier). Un Chocolatier de L’amour Perdu initially started print in 2008, and is currently at 3 printed volumes.

Un Chocolatier de L’amour Perdu is a series by Setona Mizushiro, an author known best in the U.S. for two series, X-Day, published by TokyoPop back in 2003, and After School Nightmare, published by the now defunct Go!Comi.  After School Nightmare was nominated for the Eisner award for “Best U.S. Edition of International Material – Japan” in 2007, and was named one of the best 10 graphic novels for teens in 2008 by the Young Adult Library Services Association. She is a fairly accomplished writer, and recently has been writing comics almost exclusively for Shueisha and Shogakukan. She seems to be simultaneously working on a two different series; Shitsuren Chocolatier which I will explain later, and Nounai Poison Berry, a piece being published currently in Shueisha‘s Chorus josei anthology.

EDIT: I have also been informed that Setona Mizushiro is also writing a third series called Kuro Bara Alice. It is currently at its fifth volume, and is published in Akita Shoten‘s Princess anthology. Thanks to Arya for pointing this out!

Un Chocolatier de L’amour Perdu is written for Shogakukan‘s Flowers anthology, which is a monthly josei publication that has been home to a few other award nominees, such as Umimachi Diary by Akimi Yoshida, which was nominated for the 3rd Manga Taishou awards, as well as the 12th and 13th Osama Tezuka Cultural Awards. Flowers is also the home of Kaze Hikaru, a series I’m desperately trying to find and read thanks to some well written praise from Kate Dacey, and an ongoing piece by Moto Hagio, Anywhere But Here. Clearly this anthology isn’t fooling around.

What I find most interesting about Un Chocolatier de L’amour Perdu is its natural bilingual state.  The main character, Souta, trying to impress a girl he likes, travels to Paris to learn the better points of becoming a pâtissier. On this journey, he must speak French in order to communicate with some characters, and there are multiple panels where we find Souta and another character speaking in French (along with Japanese subtitles, which was something I thought wonderfully bizarre, coming from a culture that’s used to English subtitles). In the panel above, Souta enters a pâtisserie in France, and essentially says that he wants to work at the pâtisserie. I love the startled look on the shop manager’s face.

Un Chocolatier de L’amour Perdu seems to be a tale of unrequited love. Souta desires to impress this girl he loves by making her lovely cakes and chocolate, but after returning from France, she has already become engaged to another man. Naturally, since he is now an accomplished pâtissier, and they are still friends, she asks him to make her wedding cake. Whammy!

I think that the combination of heartbreak, chocolate, and unrequited love would make for an excellent bit of reading, and so, for my first license request of 2011, I’m asking for Un Chocolatier de L’amour Perdu. It seems like it would be an excellent addition to either Viz Media‘s Signature line, or their Shojo Beat lineup, which is stealthily adding more josei to its rosters.

Manga Widget Investigates: Cage of Eden

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Generally, I use this blog as a way to showcase my reviews and opinions on the manga publishing business in the United States. One of my new year’s resolutions for this blog was to get a more in-depth look at the publishing business from both sides of the Pacific, to learn more about manga as it appears in its native format, and most importantly, to blog more often. This post (and any future posts like it) are an attempt to roll all these goals together. Let me know what you think in the comments!

I want to start the inaugural edition of Manga Widget Investigates with something that I have been thinking about for awhile now; Kodansha‘s arrival in the USA. The announcement that Kodansha was starting business as a solo venture in the USA was big news originally, but it seemed like all they did originally  was take back their licenses from Dark Horse and TokyoPop and reprint Dark Horse‘s translations of Ghost in the Shell and Akira. This obviously was met with some consternation from manga fans – surely they weren’t just going to try to reprint previous books, were they? Things got even worse when Del Rey lost all its licenses to Kodansha. For a time, I wondered whether or not I would ever get to read the 29th volume of Negima!

Now with Kodansha USA finally revealing some of its 2011 plans late last year, we have a chance to see what the company has been working on since Kodansha split with Del Rey as its publishing partner. As is to be expected, most of Del Rey‘s profitable line-up has been adopted for publication at Kodansha USA, but they did also announce a few new licenses that were being printed along with Del Rey‘s catalog. A subset of their shonen release announcements come from Weekly Shonen Magazine, Kodansha‘s equivalent to Shonen Jump.

The reason for this seems fairly simple; Weekly Shonen Magazine is the source for a lot of the previously published manga through Del Rey: Fairy Tail, Mahou Sensei Negima!, Code: Breaker, and Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle are all series from Weekly Shonen Magazine that have done well in North America. Additional notable series to grace the pages of Weekly Shonen Magazine include Love Hina, Akita no Joe, Rave Master, GetBackers, and Samurai Deeper Kyo. When Del Rey‘s biggest financial hitters were all published in the same magazine, it seems intuitive to try to get the next big hit with another series from Weekly Shonen Magazine. Enter stage left: Cage of Eden.

Cage of Eden (or Eden no Ori) is a survival-themed manga that is currently running in Weekly Shonen Magazine, The book focuses on a group of students on an airplane back to Japan from a field trip to Guam. Due to some mysterious cause, the plane crashes, and although the emergency landing leaves most of the people on board alive, the island they land on is full of strange, prehistoric beasts, all willing to prey on unsuspecting humans.

Cage of Eden has been described by some as a mix between Lord of the Flies and Land of the Lost, which sounds like pretty good fiction, provided it is done right. Representatives from Kodansha also said at its license announcement that the series had a bit of a Negima! flavor to it, which, translated into regular English, means the series is going to have unabashed fan service mixed in with the trials and tribulations of survival fiction. Whatever Cage of Eden is doing, it is doing it right; the series started in 2008 and is still being serialized. Currently Cage of Eden is up to ten volumes in print in Japan.

Yoshinobu Yamada, the writer of Cage of Eden, seems like he’s done the survival genre before. His first series, EX-Shounen Hyouryuu (Young Castaways) ran for five volumes for the same anthology. His other work includes a Kendo shonen piece called Chanbara which ran for two volumes in 2003.

Cage of Eden isn’t the only manga coming from Weekly Shonen Magazine. The new series Bloody Monday, which began publication in 2007, is currently in its “second season” in the magazine (much like Season Two of Rosario + Vampire).

However good or bad Cage of Eden is, we can expect to see it hit shelves in August of 2011. Whether or not people like boobs, butts, and panty shots with their Lord of the Flies remains to be seen.