New to my blogroll, at least. I’ve added Love Manga, a team effort from Immelda Alty and David Taylor. It’s always to see another manga-centric blog, and Alty and Taylor have some great insights.
For instance, there’s Alty’s look at Fruit Basket‘s evil scheme to take over the publishing industry. (Okay, not really, but that book seems to print money.) She also sums up the latest Bookscan graphic novel numbers released at ICv2:
“Personally speaking I’m overjoyed with the fact that Manga is stunningly popular in Bookstores. We all know the images we like to see of bookshelves groaning under the weight of fresh new titles, but sometimes its good to have the figures to back that image up.”
(As an aside, only two non-manga titles in the top 50? OUCH.)
From Taylor, you get musings on Heidi MacDonald’s wonderful state-of-the-manga-industry overview at The Beat:
“Home-grown talent creating in the Manga style. Though my natural cynical self wonders if this is just a move to get those ‘I don’t read foreign crap’ readers onto manga. I’ve got a bit more to say on this point, so I’ll probably do a posting about it later. Does Manga even need a next new thing to keep itself going? The answer is probably a yes, but with the VAST, and I mean VAST untapped potential of licenses still awaiting translation from Japan and Korea for example, I would hope that they are not side lined in an attempt to keep pushing forward.”
Good stuff all around, and I look forward to seeing more from them.