Posted in: Comics, Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh, san diego comic con | Tagged: Attack On Titan, Comics, entertainment, manga, sdcc

SDCC '15: A Look At The Manga Announcements – A Look! It Moves! Special

Adi Tantimedh writes,

With all the DC and Marvel movie and TV announcements at the con, you wouldn't think there were manga announcements to be made as well, and there are a few big ones.

Kodansha announced that the US edition of volume 16 of Attack on Titan would have a special edition with a new cover by The Walking Dead Artist Tony Moore and a deck of playing cards. The second omnibus of the series would collect volumes 6-10 and also the 8-page crossover story with Marvel Attack on Avengers. Volume 17, out on December 1^st, will have a Special edition with a DVD containing an Original Video Anime spinoff episode "Ilse's Notebook", produced by the same studio that made the anime. Fans of the manga will already know where this side story is adapted from in the series.

The latter is a major change in US manga publishing policies. It's already standard practise in Japan for publishers to bundle special editions of manga releases with DVDs containing original straight-to-video anime episodes, which are far from cheap productions but have proper budgets and production values. That this is now being done in the US might indicate just how profitable the series is now and that it's financially feasible to do it.

Kodansha also announced they would be publishing Paradise Residence, the 2009 series set in a girl's boarding school dormitory by Kosuke Fujishima, the creator of Oh! My Goddess!

Udon Entertainment continued their licensing of lavish artbooks from video games and manga with titles like The World of Professor Layton, Duel Art: Yu-Gi-Oh, Phoenix Wright: Dual Destinies and The Capcom Fighting Games tribute artbook, but they also stepped up their manga licenses. They announced Moyocco Anno's kiddie witch series Sugar Sugar Rune, which was originally published by Del Rey a few years ago when they had their deal with Kodansha. The new edition will be out next year. They also announced for this autumn the manga adaptations of Kill La Kill, the hugely popular game franchise Persona 4 and the time-traveling visual novel Steins; Gate, whose original game has already been translated into English for the PC, and will come to Playstation 3 and Playstation Vita this year.

The biggest manga news out of the whole con was Udon announcing that they had licensed Rose of Versailles. This 1979 series is one of the Holy Grails of US manga fandom and no one thought this would ever happen. Ryoko Ikeda's manga series is considered a classic in Japan, and hugely influential in its mix of historical fiction, gender-bending, lesbian comics and tragic romance. Set in the pre-revolutionary French court with a young Marie Antoinette, the series follows Oscar, a woman raised as a man to succeed her father as Captain of the Palace Guards who becomes increasingly caught between duty and love. The series inspired anime series (which is how most Western fans came to know it), stage musicals and movies, and had been translated in Europe, but never in English till now. The US edition will collect two tankubons into one omnibus and will be out the second half of 2016.

So there you have it. The announcements here shed a little light in the continuing health and evolution of the US manga business. The popularity of current anime series determines whether their manga versions and even original Light Novel versions will be published in the US. Omnibus editions of series are proving popular among fans who want more bang for their buck. Artbooks are as popular as ever. Udon and Dark Horse are bringing out manga adaptations of popular video games. Kodansha are testing the popularity of special editions that bundle DVDs with exclusive original episodes of the anime. The Rose of Versailles was the biggest surprise since older manga series, those published before the 1990s or even the 2000s, had been thought to be too expensive, but perhaps the fan demand will prove it profitable after all, which would set a precedent for future licenses.

Thanks to Deb Aoki, Crunchyroll and Anime News Network for their detailed news updates from the con.

It's all about the books at lookitmoves@gmail.com.Follow the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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