Happy new year! At least next week, when you’ll be able to celebrate with a nice stack of manga from Kodansha and Viz! Courtesy the Midtown Comics list, and mostly the same as your friends at Diamond. (I say mostly as Wandering Son still is AWOL.)
Kodansha has two big omnibuses for all you Ken Akamatsu fans who enjoy buying things twice to get new, more accurate translations. Which, let’s face it, is most of you. The second Love Hina omnibus and third Negima omnibus will bring you over 1000 pages of tsundere girls getting embarrassed and hitting the men/boys they love. (Hey, it’s a known buying market. Stick with what you’re good at, that’s what Ken says.) There’s also the third volume of Monster Hunter Orage, for Hiro Mashima fans. (Note that all that was out this week in bookstores. Diamond: where shipping dates go to die.)
About 257 years after the release of the first One Piece artbook, the series has apparently sold well enough that Viz is releasing the second. Oda’s fantastical color pages are filled with imagination and strange animals, and I can’t wait to see what they look like in a larger size.
Meanwhile, the first week of the month always means a healthy dose of Viz’s Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat lines. From the former we have Naruto 54 and One Piece 60, both getting a slight speedup due to Shonen Jump Alpha. (They’re already available digitally.) There’s also Vol. 2 of Psyren. Jump Square gives us the 7th volume of the 2nd series of Rosario + Vampire, and the little-known V Jump, which specialized in video game tie-in manga, gives us Yu-Gi-Oh GX 8, one of the grandest game tie-ins of them all.
Shojo Beat is putting out several of its heavy hitters: Black Bird 12, Kimi ni Todoke 12, and Skip Beat 26. There’s also new volumes of Dengeki Daisy (oh, those cliffhangers…) and Oresama Techer (SUPER-BUN!). Lastly, for Sanrio fans, Viz releases the first volume of the adorable-looking Fluffy Fluffy Cinnamoroll, which is surprisingly printed right-to-left. Well, may as well get the future manga fans reading that direction early on, I suppose.
[…] The second volume of Wandering Son is the highlight of this week’s new manga releases; Fantagraphics lists it as out next week, but ComicList listed it this week and Amazon shows it as available now. Crazy. The Manga Village team makes their picks, Lissa Pattillo surveys the latest manga in her On the Shelf column at Otaku USA, Lori Henderson has this week’s all-ages comics and manga at Good Comics for Kids, and Sean Gaffney, always one step ahead, is already looking at next week’s new manga. […]