Manga the Week of 4/4

It’s a first week of the month at Midtown, and we’ve got the usual Viz suspects, some Kodansha runoff from last month courtesy Diamond, some new Vertical titles (also a week late, also courtesy Diamond), and… two very odd releases.

Bandai may be dead, but it apparently had quite a backlog of titles to keep releasing. Thus we get Vol. 5 of both of their Code Geass doujinshi anthologies – Queen for the male readers, and Knight for the female ones. I’m going to take a wild guess that these are the final volumes we’ll see from Bandai here.

Kodansha has another volume of the Negima re-release, which updates the translation with its current version provided by the Nibley twins. This volume has Vols. 10-12 of the original, covering a great deal of the tournament battle, which, unlike many shonen tournament battle arcs, was really where Akamatsu came into his own. There’s some great stuff here.

I didn’t get a chance to use GTO as my featured image when Vol. 1 came out, so it goes here. The second volume of 14 Days in Shonan is almost nonstop action, and really packs a kick. As does its hero. There’s also the 3rd omnibus volume of Drops of God, containing the original Vol. 5 and 6. It looks as if we may finally get to see the First Apostle. As well as lots more wine.

Then there’s the huge pile o’ Viz. A Devil and Her Love Song got the image last time instead of GTO, but Vol. 2 excites me just as much as Vol. 1 did. There’s also a new Dawn of the Arcana, Kamisama Kiss, Sakura Hime, and Skip Beat!, giving you lots of shoujo goodness. If shonen is more your thing, well, this is Jump week. New Bakuman, new Bleach (still not at all caught up with the online releases), new Blue Exorcist (man, this and Kamisama Kiss come out FAST), A new Rosario + Vampire Season 2, a nicely retro new Slam Dunk Vol. 21, and the 9th Toriko. Lastly, they also have the first volume of that Voltron Forge graphic novel to excite sentai fans.

As an aside, this is my 100th post tagged ‘Manga The Week Of’. I hope it’s proven of interest to you, as it’s mostly just an excuse for me to geek out, and also keep track of what’s been coming out when. What whets your appetite to read over the Easter weekend?