Fabulous prizes

ComiPress lists the winners of the 11th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Awards. One of them is Magnificent 49er Ryoko Yamagishi, who received the Grand Prize for Maihime Terepushikoora.

There’s depressingly little web-based information available on this group of influential manga-ka, but Yamagishi’s brief bio on Wikipedia still manages to whet my appetite, with titles like Tut-ankh-amen, Isis and Sphinx. I’m always up for fictionalizations of Ancient Egypt, if those titles do in fact tread that territory. (One never knows how tenuous the connection will be between title and content.)

In other awards news, MangaCast’s Ed Chavez takes a thorough look at this year’s winners of the 31st Kodansha Manga Awards and contemplates their licensing likelihood, providing a handy list of past licensed winners. (Kitchen Princess won last year? Seriously? I thought the first volume was really mediocre, but I thought that about the first volume of Fruits Basket too, so maybe I should give the series a second look.)