Okay, when I come home from the comics shop, I usually read… y’know… comics, but I find myself distracted by all kinds of manga craziness in the new Previews catalog.
CMX launches a new line for mature readers featuring two horror titles. The first is Kanako (School Zone) Inuki’s Presents. The second is Iqura Sugimoto’s Variante, which sounds kind of like Parasyte. They’ll both be in a larger format (5.5” x 8”) at a slightly higher price ($12.99). I’d also like to note that the cover for the second volume of Masashi Tanaka’s Gon is the cutest thing ever.
Horror fans will be pleased to see Viz give the Signature treatment to two works by Junji Ito – Uzumaki and Gyo, which they’d published previously. I haven’t read Gyo, but Uzumaki is amazingly creepy, for the most part.
Tokyopop gets on the omnibus with “Ultimate Editions” of Battle Royale, Warcraft: The Sunwell Trilogy, and Fruits Basket, collecting multiple volumes at a time in a hardcover packaging. Royale ($24.99) and Warcraft ($29.99) collect three volumes per, though Fruits Basket ($14.99) seems to stick to two.
In other Tokyopop news, they seem to have cut back a bit on their Previews pages, skipping the cover images for many of their longer-running series and going with more conventional listings, concentrating the illustrations on new series and products. (They still provide cover art for a good half of those end-of-the-section listings, though.) One of the books getting the full treatment is Kozue Amano’s Aqua, which I would be looking forward to even if the solicitation didn’t include the possibly snarky promise of a “refreshed translation.”
(The publisher’s revised web site isn’t quite up and running yet, as has been noted elsewhere, but I’ll add links when it goes live, provided the redesign doesn’t drive me mad… MAD! It could happen.)
Yen Press arrives with the release of Keiko Tobe’s With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child. It’s hard to settle on a pick of the month, but this one’s definitely in the running. (Yen hasn’t gotten any farther with its web site, but here’s an ICv2 article on the book.)
I’m pretty sure that these had been solicited previously, but Fanfare/Ponent Mon re-lists Kan Takahama’s Awabi and Jiro Taniguchi’s The Ice Wanderer. Nouvelle bliss!
(What is it with the shortage of usable permalinks? I feel like I’m wearing oven mitts as I format this!)