Magical Princess Sky Allie Malott Self-published 2018 When you have a genre like magical girls that’s gone on long enough to be slammed full of tropes, you can approach making a new work in a number of ways. You can play it straight without any innovation and become cliche. You can poke fun at it…
Journey Across the Seven Seas: Rainbow Edition
Pride Month is over, which means it’s an excellent time to keep the queerness going by checking out the LGBT+ releases Seven Seas has brought out recently. Oh, and some other good stuff too, I suppose!
Journey Across the Seven Seas: Please Put Some Clothes On, Thx
What do the latest batch of Seven Seas releases have in common? Well, a lot of naked women. Then again, that’s to be expected when two of the new releases are tied to Go Nagai…
Momocon: A Convention for Fans of All Kinds
It had only been a month since the cancellation and resulting fallout of Universal Fan Con, and it was still on my mind. Not so much the actual event, but all the fans and vendors that had been let down. As a fan, it hurts when I see other fans being bailed on and having…
Don’t Eat That: Tapas’s Incubator Program
When it comes to the publishing industry, my background is largely in fiction prose. I’ve spent years reading and researching fiction publishing contracts, learning what the terms mean and what the red flags are. I’ve seen all sorts of rights and royalties fuckery attempts from the incompetent and the outright scammy, sometimes with tragic, “Here’s…
Journey Across the Seven Seas: Girls, Girls, Girls
Time for our next round of manga from Seven Seas Entertainment! Coming up, we have magical girls, armored girls, and girls with spiders. Wait, don’t leave! It’s a cute spider!
Women of Mangaka: Yuu Watase
During the 1990s, a time of relatively few shojo manga series (or manga series in general, really) being translated to English, one of the cornerstones that everyone at least knew of was Fushigi Yuugi, an anime based on the manga by Yuu Watase. For lots of girls of that age, the protagonist, high school girl…
Journey Across the Seven Seas: New Year, New Releases
How did Seven Seas begin the year? With fresh releases, fresh series, and lots of cute to go around! In this go around, we have middle school crushes cute, chibi art style cute, 4koma comedy cute, cross-species kid friendships cute, prettyboys’ backstory angst cute… What do you mean, that last one’s not cute? It totally…
Women of Mangaka: Rumiko Takahashi
It’s Women’s History Month, so let’s talk a bit about a woman who’s made some, and may finally get recognized for it. Through March 16, voters for the Will Eisner Comics Hall of Fame will be deciding on whether the fourth nomination for Rumiko Takahashi is the charm. Takahashi already has an impressive awards shelf,…
Hipster Manga: Imawa no Kuni no Alice
Imawa no Kuni no Alice Haro Aso (writer and illustrator) Shogakukan 2010–2016 [Content warnings for this one include: suicide, (foiled) sexual assault, people dying, people being grievously injured or dismembered.] In today’s media, the book Alice in Wonderland is as much a motif as it is a piece of media on its own, inspiring works…
Journey Across the Seven Seas: Manga in the Hold
What is Seven Seas? No, it’s not the company releasing Sinbad’s Adventure (at least, not yet). Founded in 2004, Seven Seas releases about 20 new volumes a month. If the name flew under your radar like it did mine, you may not even realize how many titles they get out until you start checking your…
Hipster Manga: Angel Heart
Although it’s only half the name of the series, “heart” is literally at the center of the long-running manga Angel Heart by Tsukasa Hojo. (Literally-literally, not figuratively-literally.) It’s both a story of a transplanted heart and the code name of a young assassin aptly named Glass Heart. After a particularly gut-wrenching kill, Glass Heart decides…