A very quiet Week 2 of the month here. Usually Week 2 is where we get a pile of Del Rey from Diamond, but of course we now have to wait till May for the ‘reborn as Kodansha’ titles to come out. And I’d hoped for some Yen, but I guess I wait till next week on that.
So it’s just Viz, but there are several notable entries. The biggie here is that Volume 56 is the final volume of Inu Yasha, which Viz has now been releasing for over 12 years. Of course, they’re still doing the VIZBIG omnibuses, and we still have Rin-Ne, but it just won’t be the same without it. There is also a 2nd omnibus of the awesome Cross Game, which is now down to 2-in-1 volumes. This therefore covers the Japanese Vol. 4 & 5.
There’s plenty more Shonen Sunday stuff as well, with the penultimate Yakitate!! Japan, new Kekkaishi (which I know little of, but which is big enough to get an omnibus release from Viz this summer), as well as new Hyde & Closer and Case Closed (is he still Jimmy? I suppose Viz can’t quietly make him Conan now after all this time…)
And lastly we have the one non-Sunday release, Vol. 14 of Battle Angel Alita: Last Order. Now, Shueisha did release Vol. 15 in Japan, so it’s likely that Viz will put that one out. After that, though, there was a big fuss over reprints that rewrote old dialogue, and the artist left Shueisha entirely, and will be continuing the series in Kodansha’s Evening magazine. What this means for the books over here is, I suppose, something that only the contract writers at Viz know for sure. Hopefully the series will not go the way of Zatch Bell, canceled over in North America due to contracts and bad feelings (and, admittedly, possibly due to mediocre sales).
Oh wow, is there only one more volume of Yakitate after volume 25? For some reason I thought it was 28 volumes long (…maybe I'm getting confused with some other shounen manga…Ruroken?) It's probably about time it ended though, I thought it got quite weak about 1/3 of the way of the Yakitate 25 arc.