Seven Seas Pubwatch: July 2022

Comics Manga Pubwatch
Carrie McClain

July is here which means an even bigger heat wave to press down upon us before Fall arrives! Like many of you, I’m trying to find ways to beat the heat as I wonder why it seems our rights are being rolled back to our grandparents’ times! There’s a variety of titles this month that is being pubbed and news of the latest licenses acquisition that include a spin off and a collector’s edition of a shoujo classic! And as always, an update on the union and other important news spots! Jump in, and take a seat as we get into it!

 For Those Who Dare to Enjoy Time Travel:

Tokyo Revengers (Omnibus) Vol 1-2
Story & Art by: Ken Wakui
Translation: Project Ceres
Lettering: Robert Harkins
July 26, 2022

Action! Time Travel! Folks Getting Stomped out Air Force One Style! Young Love! And a lot of Cool Looking Characters for No Damn Reason! If you missed the wildly popular anime and live-action film, you can take comfort in reading the start of the manga series that inspired the fandom that stands strong on it. Seven Seas Entertainment is publishing 2-in- 1 omnibuses of Ken Wakui’s critically acclaimed manga series about a man time-traveling back to his youth to save his girlfriend from a street gang! Hanagaki Takemichi when watching the news learns his junior-high girlfriend Tachibana Hinata has met a terrible end.

Science fiction fans, come get your lives cause Takemichi is sent twelve years into the past to face the Tokyo Manji Gang, a notorious group that once made his life hell. In order to change the future, our time traveler sent back in time must do the impossible to save not just Hinata who loses her life thanks to the gang in the present but change the future for the better. This means getting his ship rocked and becoming more than a halfway decent fighter and delinquent and even befriending the leader of the most infamous gang in Tokyo?  Originally pubbed in English in digital format by Kodansha USA, Seven Seas will publish the series in print for the very first time as 2-in-1 omnibus paperbacks, formatted for a beautiful oversized trim with all-new lettering. Be sure to peep the exclusive Barnes & Noble limited edition with a variant cover and double-sided foldout poster!

For Lovers of The Spooky and The Supernatural:

Box of Light
Story & Art by: Seiko Erisawa
Translation: Daniel Komen
Lettering: Brendon Hull
July 19, 2022

Seiko Erisawa’s Box of Light looks promising even just from the short preview of the first chapter that I read. This “spooky tale of a haunted convenience store” has one main location and attraction”: a convenience store that that is apparently at the crossroads of life and death and each chapter features another player in the overall story whose life (or afterlife) will be changed after popping in. The first chapter contains a story about an overworked office worker whose impatience of checking out faster after being pressured to get back to the office faster reveals a guest she knows she’ll never get her boss or her boss’s boss to believe exists.

This self-contained volume leans towards horror in a slice-of-life kind of way that makes me want to read more with the store’s strange employees, neighborhood folk’s visits, and weird creatures. The Seven Seas Entertainment website tells us this work by Erisawa was awarded a top spot in both the Kono Manga wo Yome! and Kono Manga ga Sugoi! rankings in Japan. So that’s worth noting for this newer work by a newer mangaka in my eyes.

For the BL Enthusiasts:

Go For It Again, Nakamura!!
Story & Art by: Syundei
Translation: Amber Tamosaitis
Lettering: Kaitlyn Wiley
July 5, 2022

YO!!!!! Shout-out to one of my fave BL titles! Syundei’s Go For It, Nakamura!! was both one of my fave one-shot volumes (until the announcement of this new volume) and one of my gateway titles into BL that I felt was great for newer readers to the genre. I found the first book a hilarious and quite wholesome story about one young man’s attempts to keep it together in front of his crush that was so fun to read and reread over the years. So you can imagine my happiness when I heard that the hit BL ROM-COM had returned! Was it love at first sight when Nakamura met his classmate, Hirose? Absolutely.

After the very introverted and awkward Nakamura finally worked up the nerve to speak to him, the two high-school boys became friends. Now he needs every bit of grace and miracle to keep it all together and not scare Hirose off. Being buddy-buddy with your crush who is now you new friend is harder than it looks and Nakamura is still on the struggle bus. I can’t tell you how much I’m loving what I’m reading so far: it feels like no time has passed as the mangaka has placed us back in this universe with these beloved characters. Our hopeless titular character shouting out “SEASON TWO ME IS THE STRONGEST ME YET!!” is the right type of chaotic energy you need in your life right now if you are in serious need of some laughs.

Wrap Up

Anime Expo 2022 was a lot of buzz and hype this year as I watched updates from home! Seven Seas did announce several new light novels and manga licenses. Personally, I am most excited for Iwatobineko‘s The Invisible Man and His Soon-To-Be Wife as The Country Without Humans, also being currently pubbed by Seven Seas is a lowkey hidden gem and fave of mine. I am so ready to chat up my high school friends as I try to remember how messy Wataru Yoshizumi’s shoujo manga series Marmalade Boy was as Seven Seas preps for this new collector’s edition. (I’ve also always wanted to read manga by Yumi Tamura.) Note: I did discover through the union’s twitter account that some folks of the company who attended did, unfortunately, test positive for COVID-19. We’re wishing all of them a recovery that allows them rest and a workplace that does right by them!

Update on the union news:

BIG SHOUT-OUT to the United Workers of Seven Seas as they are now the first unionized manga & light novel publisher in North America with CODE-CWA !  This is such a momentum moment that I am still celebrating! What a win not just for the manga and publishing industries but what a great first step in the right direction for supporting folks making living wages, benefits, and recognition that should be standard in the first place. Read more about the big win here.  

Lastly,

As manga, manhua and light novel publishers continue to give us more webcomics in printed form, I must say that the Killing Stalking books look great! I’m looking forward to Ratana Satis’ PULSE GL book hopefully receiving the same treatment as I tend to lean more into reading Yuri and GL these days. Additionally, PULSE was a Lenzhin webtoon that I had not had a chance to read beforehand.  Super interested to see how the next releases in the Mature-rated lineup from Lenzhin roll out here. Till next time!

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Carrie McClain

Carrie McClain

Carrie McClain is a Southern Californian native who navigates the world as writer, editor and media scholar who firmly believes that we can and we should critique the media we consume. The X-Men were some of her first best friends. She is forever chasing the nostalgic high of attending school book fairs. As a retired magical girl, you can usually find her buried under a pile of Josei manga.
mcclain.y.carrie@gmail.com
https://carriemcclain.carrd.co/
Carrie McClain

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