(Spoiler Warning: This article contains spoilers for Skip Beat!) Shoujo manga—or manga produced for girls—is often dismissed by casual readers as manga brimming with stereotypes. In fact, oftentimes shoujo stories are not taken seriously solely because they are aimed at young girls. Despite the popularity of serious manga like Fruits Basket and Boys Over Flowers,…
Shinbun Saturday: New Life for a Fan Favorite
Fan favorite gets manga adaptation Good news for Baccano! fans! We may never get a second season of the anime, but we are getting a manga adaptation later this year. Based on the light novels by Ryohgo Narita, Baccano! tells the story about a group of alchemists and an elixir that grants immortality against a…
Load Your Cannons! 5 Memorable Manga Ship Wars
I love fandom. I hate fandom. It’s an object of my eternal adoration, and it’s a source of my constant frustration. Navigating fandom is like walking through a minefield. Surprise racism. Unexpected misogynism. Bi erasure. There are so many pitfalls waiting to trip you up. But you know where the biggest danger of fandom lies?…
Shinbun Saturday: A Campaign to Bring a Classic WWII Manga to Schools
Last Gasp Books launches Barefoot Gen Kickstarter Earlier this week, Last Gasp Books launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a hardcover edition of Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nazakawa. The aim is to raise $36,000 in order to print 4,000 copies to be distributed to schools and libraries. Based on the mangaka’s real-life experiences, the classic…
Shinbun Saturday: Eluding Government Bans and Facing IP Laws
Classic science fiction manga coming to North America Move over, Udon Entertainment. Classic manga fans were granted a boon this past week at Otakon with Kodansha announcing their licensing of 1978 series Queen Emeraldas. The series follows Hiroshi Umino as he sneaks onto a spaceship to escape from Earth. It will mark Queen Emeraldas’ first…
My Left or Your Right? The Newbie Friendliness of Manga
Picture, if you will, a fresh-faced fan walking into a comic book store on Free Comic Book Day. She picks up a haul of titles that look interesting. Hey, it’s free! Perfect opportunity to try something new out, right? Included in that haul is a sampler put out by a North American manga publisher. How awesome!…
When Boy’s Love Goes Bad: CLAMP’s Legal Drug
(Disclaimer: Review copies of Legal Drug and Drug & Drop vol. 1 and vol. 2 were supplied by Dark Horse. This essay also contains some light spoilers.) First, a primer! If you’re familiar with boy’s love, girl’s love, yaoi, yuri, shonen-ai, or shojo-ai just go ahead and skip this paragraph. For those of you who…
Manga to Movies: Why Eastern Comic Film Adaptations Thrive and Western Don’t
Marvel and DC have always been large moving forces for comics, and their recent forays into expanding movie universes has helped put comics in the popular culture limelight in a huge way. While Hollywood filmmakers have been “loosely basing” movies from comics on the sly for years, the open appreciation of comics and comic film…
Shinbun Saturday: Star Wars Gets the Ukiyo-e Treatment, Thanks to Fans
School Live and the positive relationship between manga sales and anime series If anyone ever doubted the purpose of anime, the team behind summer success Gakkou Gurashi!, or School-Live! might have some insight to share with them. With the release of the anime in early July, sales of the manga have seen a substantial increase,…
Friendship Through Necessity: What Soul Eater and Princess Leia Have in Common
This article contains spoilers for Princess Leia #1 and Soul Eater Prologue 1. I didn’t expect to find a connection between Princess Leia #1 and Soul Eater Prologue 1. The plot for these stories can be found at opposite ends of the comic book ether, so it stands to reason that you’re probably scrunching your…
Short & Sweet: Fionna and Cake, Awkward, Junji Ito’s Fragments of Horror, and More!
Every month, WWAC’s staff reads a lot of comics. A lot. Short & Sweet (Or Sour) is our regular showcase for bite-sized reviews of the latest books!
Shinbun Saturday: Versailles Comes to North America
An unlicensible manga comes to North America at last SDCC wasn’t quite the same licensing bonanza as Anime Expo, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t a couple major items of note. The biggest manga news to come out of the con is that Udon Entertainment licensed The Rose of Versailles. North American manga publishers tend to…