February 9, 2009 - Ohayocon has come and gone, ditto Ikkicon in Texas and a handful of other events around the country, which means the annual anime convention season is officially underway. If the company of other fans doesn't wrack you with pangs of reflected self-loathing, try finding out if there's a convention in your area and see if you can't make plans to attend. If nothing else, it should be a valuable opportunity to meet people with even more deficient social skills than you have.

The beginning of the convention season is also the beginning of the annual licensing announcement season, so we have a few odds and ends to report as far as new cartoons making their way across the Pacific. Without further ado, let's have a look at some of those.


Recent News

As usual, New York Comic Con saw a hefty presence from American anime and manga publishers, and a few interesting details dropped here and there. Funimation didn't have anything to say about the new Fullmetal Alchemist TV series, but it did confirm plans to release the FMA Premium Collection OVAs this summer. Sooner than later, meanwhile, Funimation plans to kick off the popular Shonen Jump series D. Gray-Man -- the first season set hits on March 31 -- and keep on reissuing successful titles from its back catalog like Love Hina and Fruits Basket

Bandai Entertainment plans to have Gundam 00 on American store shelves in the summertime as well, not very long at all after the second half of the series finishes airing in Japan. (With luck, we'll see that on Blu-ray as well as DVD, since it's come out on both formats over in Japan.) Besides the TV series, Bandai also promises to bring out the 00 manga and the 00 novel series (which you probably didn't even know existed), so Gundam fans will be able to fairly wallow in mobile-suit action later this year.

The cult-favorite comedy series Hayate the Combat Butler is also on its way out through Bandai this summer, specifically in July. Following the adventures of a spoiled heiress and her long-suffering manservant, Hayate has a bit more to it than the super-cutesy presentation might lead you to believe, so it might be worth a first or second look later this year. Speaking of unholy uber-cuteness, meanwhile, Lucky Star fans will be able to start collecting Kagami Yoshimizu's original manga when Bandai publishes the first volume this May.

Anime column week three Bandai item


Some Kind Of Monster

Perhaps the most unexpected convention announcement of the last couple weeks came from Viz Media, which will apparently be doing -- well, something, which is more than anyone expected& -- with the TV series based on Naoki Urasawa's thriller manga Monster. Viz just finished publishing the original 18-volume epic in the United States last month, but most observers assumed that the animated adaptation would never make it over to the states -- after all, it ran for a hefty 74 episodes. Not so, says Viz, and more details about an American home-video release will be forthcoming soon.

Monster is a psychological drama revolving around a pair of cat-and-mouse games. Kenzo Tenma, a Japanese neurosurgeon serving a residency abroad in Germany, finds himself pursuing a serial killer whose life he coincidentally saved, and is pursued in turn by an implacable police detective who suspects Tenma himself of the murderer's crimes. The animated version does a fine job preserving the original series' grim, paranoid atmosphere, so with luck it'll find an audience over here in the near future.

Urasawa's American fans seem to be spoiled for choice these days. Besides Monster on DVD, Viz has just begun publishing two of the author's other manga serials -- 20th Century Boys, a labyrinthine modern-day conspiracy thriller, and Pluto, a hard-boiled re-envisioning of a classic mystery story from Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy comics. Both come highly recommended from these quarters, and they're just now available in stateside bookstores.

Anime column week three Urasawa item


In this weeks' reviews, we have teenagers crash-landing on alien planets, goddesses crash-landing in Japanese college dormitories and Samuel L. Jackson. Lots and lots of Samuel L. Jackson.