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.

It may be quiet in your office, and everyone’s out having a post-Christmas lull, but there are lots of things coming into your local comic shop. Or at least Midtown’s shop. As always, actual dates may vary.

Dark Horse releases two series that could not be further apart from each other. The tits and violence appeal of Gantz, whose Vol. 20 is out next week, contrasts with the chaste and pure Oh My Goddess (Vol. 40), where even the supposed sexpot Urd isn’t doing anything worth slapping a rating on. That said, Oh My Goddess’s cast is breaking into Hell, so perhaps things will change.

Wandering Son was a very pleasant surprise in 2011, and I am pleased that we will be seeing the second volume before the year is out. Volume 1 was setting up the two leads and their desires, I expect Vol. 2 will throw a few monkey wrenches into things.

And Kodansha has its giant pile of manga which every other bookstore got today. Ah, Diamond… this includes Vol. 3s for Animal Land, Bloody Monday and Cage of Eden; the second Tokyo Mew Mew omnibus; another Phoenix Wright volume; and the 12th in everyone’s favorite footnoted series, Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei. There is also Vol. 21 of Air Gear, for those who read Tenjo Tenge and felt it just needed more inline skates.

Anything here reaching out to grab you? Throw off 2011 in style… with manga!

Looking for a last-minute gift for that special someone before the holidays? Why not get them some brand-new manga? There’s a number of titles out this coming week for any type of fan.

Remember Del Rey? When Kodansha split off, for contractual reasons the xxxHOLIC books stayed with the parent. And now we get the penultimate volume in the series, which… well, honestly, it’s lost me by this point. But I’m sure other Watanuki fans ill love it to bits!

As for Kodansha itself, there’s always the third volume of Mardock Scramble. Which is unusually resistant to my glib jokemaking, but possibly I’ll think of something by the time the fourth volume comes around.

Midtown Comics is apparently running late on its wine manga, as they not only have the second volume of international sensation The Drops of God, but also the first volume as well. Sounds like a gift set to me!

Yes, I want to have this be the image for Dorohedoro 5, which is awesome and highly underrated (stop looking for the plot – just let it wash over you), and you should all be buying that. But I just have to give prime position to the 27th and FINAL volume of Fullmetal Alchemist. The whole series has been building to this volume, an it absolutely does not disappoint – one of the best endings to any shonen series in North America. And if you’ve somehow missed the previous 26 volumes, Viz is kindly selling all 27 in a giant box. In fact, the box came out before this individual volume. Lastly, there’s the 7th and 8th volume (or 4th omnibus) of boobs and fights manga Tenjo Tenge, which if nothing else reminds me I still need to read the 3rd.

So what’s in your stocking?