Manga the Week of 11/16

You get two images in this post, mostly because every time I post a horizontal image it breaks the Bookshelf site. So let’s start with the actual manga, then get to the things I’m actually super hyper excited about.

Digital Manga Publishing has a few more releases. Lovephobia is a new BL-ish title from Enterbrain’s B’s Log spinoff magazine Kyun!, and features vampires. The author, I know, has written a lot of Gintama yaoi doujinshi. Rabbit Man, Tiger Man hits Vol. 2, and is still not a Tiger and Bunny spinoff. And there is the third volume of A Strange And Mystifying Story, which apparently has demons. Never let it be said that DMP does not have its finger on the pulse of the modern manga buyer.

Kodansha and Diamond seem to have settled nicely into “one week later than bookstores” at this point. So we don’t get Sailor Moon 2. But we do get Fairy Tail 16, which I think wraps up the arc with Laxus, and Arisa 5, which no doubt continues to be thrilling. (It ran very long for a modern-day Nakayoshi series, so much have good chops.) Sorry, folks, you should see Ami and Minako next week.

Yes, just in time for the Manga Movable Feast, it’s a short story collection called Tesoro, which I suspect will be filled with middle-aged men and sweet quiet interludes. If just one volume is not enough for you, meanwhile, why not buy the Fullmetal Alchemist 1-27 box set? You can a) read the final volume early, and b) it makes a nifty blunt instrument! Kurozakuro reaches its final volume, and we get a new Saturn Apartments. Lastly, we’ve apparently caught up with Real enough that we get a new volume of that as well, so Real 10 gives you all the drama you could possibly want.

And Yen press, as always, seems to own Week 3 of our monthly schedule. New Haruhi, new Haruhi-chan. The Giant Hardcover Omnibus of Death for High School of the Dead (I saw that thing at Comic Con. If you can’t afford FMA as your weapon, this will serve.) New Nabari no Ou, Omamori Himari, and Sumomomo Momomo will surely sate your thirst for inscrutable Japanese titles that tell you little about the content. And there are new adaptations of Avi Arad’s the Innocent, and a Gossip Girl tie-in, for those who like things outside the manga box.

Though if you really want to go outside the box next week…

I literally cannot recall a time in my life when I was not reading Pogo. One of the first books I ever read so hard it fell apart in my hands was the Pogo Collection Bats and the Belles Free – and that’s not even one of the best ones! Fantagraphics announced this collection aeons ago, and it apparently has been a long, hard struggle. But trust me, if you buy this, you will see why they put in the effort. Even in these early, first two years of the strip, Pogo has a magic all its own. Anyone who loves reading dialect or the written language will find a treasure trove in Pogo, and anyone who likes biting satire will take it right to their heart. I cannot possibly recommend it enough.

(And yes, there is also the new Donald Duck collection, the first in their Carl Barks reissue project, which is also awesome, but I think Walt Kelly needs to be pushed by the online comics community more than Carl Barks, honestly.)

So what are you getting besides Pogo?