Right, Midtown is really starting to irritate me. I don’t know where their distributor has wandered off to, but the Kodansha titles are just passing them by. With that in mind…

Stuff that’s come out from Kodansha but hasn’t hit Midtown in the last 2 months: Well, we have (deep breath) Air Gear 18 (back to single volumes), The Wallflower 25 (ditto), Negima Neo 7 (the final volume, and thank God for that), and Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei 9. Reviews of Zetsubou and Wallflower are already on my site. That’s June.

From July, we have out already the 14th volume of Fairy Tail, the 3rd of the blogger favorite Arisa, the final volume of Shugo Chara proper (the last volume is a collection of the sequel, Shugo Chara Encore), and a new Ninja Girls, which is… not a blogger favorite. Those came out today.

Next week, from Diamond but not Midtown, we have the 30th volume of Mahou Sensei Negima!. It’s in the middle of a kickass arc that doesn’t let up. And while I can’t confirm this (as I didn’t order it), we may see the new Deltora Quest as well. Hey, Midtown! Fix this!

Rant over, so what *is* Midtown getting in? Well, there’s the 6th volume of Gurren Lagann, from Dengeki Daioh. There’s also a large stack of stuff from Digital Manga Publishing, who apparently finished a bunch of Taiyo Tosho stuff at once. All one-volume sets, with such suggestive titles as I Give To You, This Night’s Everything, and Entangled Circumstances. All these come from their two yaoi magazines, Hertz and Craft.

(Side note to DMP: If you license one more yaoi manga where a seme has one hand cupping the chin of his lover while the uke is staring back at him with this sort of tortured ‘do what you will, you callous ruffian of my heart’ look, I shall be very cross with you indeed.)

And that’s it. What appeals to you this week?

After the first two weeks of July were very busy, this third week, as is traditional with comic shops, is fairly quiet. (Quick note: Midtown, where I get my list from, is very behind in getting Kodansha Comics. My shop (not Midtown) lists Fairy Tail 14 as coming in next week, and I suspect that means Arisa 3, Ninja Girls 6 and Shugo Chara 11 might also show up via Diamond. But we won’t know till Monday.)

First off, Bandai has a new one-volume Code Geass spinoff, Tales of An Alternate Shogunate. It’s essentially Code Geass in 1853, assuming that 1853 had giant mecha. It ran in one of Kadokawa’s media magazines, Kerokero Ace, but does not feature anyone from Sgt. Frog. I think.

Udon’s line of child-friendly manga never really got as much attention as it probably deserved. They licensed several titles from Japanese publisher Poplar, which specializes in the ‘kodomo’ genre, aka manga for children ages 3-6. The longest title Udon picked up was the 5-volume magical girl manga The Big Adventures of Majoko, and its final volume hits shelves next week.

Vertical has Volume 8 of its quietly fantastic space manga Twin Spica. Which I believe is actually the 2nd half of 8 and all of 9 in Japan, as Vertical is starting to release these in longer chunks. Very much worth your money in any case.

And Viz has its prestige items. La Quinta Camera is the latest in Viz’s quest to license everything by Natsume Ono they possibly can (that is not either yaoi or owned by Kodansha). This ran, like Not Simple did, in Penguin Shobo’s magazine Comic SEED!, and from the reviews I’ve read I expect I will enjoy it quite a bit.

The 6th volume of Ooku is also coming out. This runs in the Japanese magazine Melody, which tends to straddle the line between shoujo and josei so much that folks get confused. A good rule of thumb is to see which imprint the collected editions come out under. Gatcha Gacha, for example, ran in Melody and was put out under the Hana to Yume imprint. Hence, shoujo. Ooku, on the other hand, comes out in the much sleeker and more adult Jets imprint. This one’s josei. Enjoyable no matter where it slots, however.

Lastly, there’s the 10th VIZBIG Edition of samurai thriller Vagabond, which I believe is the last until Japan gets a few more volumes out, as I think the collections have almost caught up with the individual volumes.

Anything appealing to you yet?

It’s a good second week of the month for manga, seeing a hefty but not overwhelming amount of stuff coming from Midtown Comics (which still seems to have misplaced June’s Kodansha releases that Diamond and bookstores already have, by the way).

Seven Seas gets to Volume 10 of its bestselling title Dance in the Vampire Bund, one of the few things they have that’s not a Dengeki work. It comes from Media Factory’s Comic Flapper. There’s also the second volume of romantic comedy Toradora!, which *is* from Dengeki Daioh, and features possibly the most popular of the four ‘loli tsunderes’ that all arrived at the same time (for the curious, the other three are Shana, Louise and Nagi).

Viz has its ‘Oh, right, we also put out Shonen Sunday stuff’ second week, and the big news here is the 4th volume in the Cross Game omnibus, which has now reached its halfway point. There’s the 39th volume of Case Closed, which is really quite impressive given how it has to compete with all those Jump titles. The 6th volume of Rin-Ne will no doubt make us all keep hoping that Sakura will actually get mad at something. New volumes of Hyde & Closer and Kurosakuro, both Vol. 5. And for Pokemon fans, two volumes of the new Black and White series, 96 pages each.

Yen Press also rolls out their July releases. The 4-koma series Ichiroh! ends here with Volume 5. Cirque Du Freak is up to Vol. 10 for you Darren Shan fans. High School of the Dead would like to remind you that yes, it is technically a shonen title, at least in Japan. Speaking of genre, what genre to call Kobato, which runs in media magazine Newtype. The fanboy genre? But of course, the big titles for yen are the Square Enix ones from GFantasy. Black Butler and Pandora Hearts, which are both smash hits. And Nabari no Ou, which… isn’t a smash hit. But has ninjas, so should be doing better than it is.

Anything interesting you? Or will you be catching up with the pile that came in this week?