This week brings new volumes of Sailor Moon, Fairy Tail, and some lesser known but still solid manga.

Kodansha has volume 3 of Sailor Moon for us this week, and they plan to release a new volume every two months until the series is complete. Just in time for this week's release, Erin Elizabeth Fraser has a comprehensive article on Sailor Moon at Sequential Tart that takes a look at this new edition compared to Tokyopop's earlier version and puts Sailor Moon into historical context. It's a great read, especially for those new to the series. Read more...

Tags Digital Manga, Fairy Tail, Hiro Mashima, Kodansha, Manga, Monster Hunter, Sailor Moon, VIZ, yaoi manga

The return of Sailor Moon, the demise of Tokyopop, and a huge move toward digital manga: 2011 was a year of big changes for the manga scene. Let's take a look at some of the main events.

The coming of Kodansha Comics: Kodansha, the largest publisher in Japan, decided to bypass the middleman and publish its manga directly in the U.S. in late 2010, and the line launched this past summer with a mix of old and new titles, including Gon, Until the Full Moon, Mardock Scramble, and Cage of Eden. Previously, Kodansha licensed its manga to Del Rey, which is an imprint of Random House. Del Rey has pretty much closed up shop (they still publish xxxHOLiC and a few OEL manga), but Kodansha has picked up many of their series, including Negima and Fairy Tail, and they are also publishing older series such as Love Hina in omnibus editions.

Sailor Moon returns: Kodansha's first announcement was big news for longtime shoujo manga fans. Sailor Moon was one of the first manga and anime series to catch on outside of Japan, and its success was largely fan-driven. Tokyopop published the original manga series, first in its magazines Mixxzine and Smile and then as small-format paperbacks, with the comic flipped to read from left to right. Tokyopop lost the license for the series sometime in the mid-2000s, and both the manga and the anime were long out of print when Kodansha Comics announced, earlier this year, that it was bringing the series back, in standard manga format and with a new translation. Not only that, but they licensed the two-volume companion series Codename Sailor V as well. Fans responded enthusiastically, and the first volume of Sailor Moon quickly sold through its 50,000 copy first printing—a phenomenal number for any manga not titled "Naruto." Read more...

Tags Japan, Kodansha Comics, Manga, Sailor Moon, TOKYOPOP, Yen Press

You have to hand it to today's fan-made independent movies -- they have almost as many special effects and production values as many "legit" big-studio productions. While debates rage on about casting on the upcoming Akira movie, enjoy a live-action adaptation of another anime/manga classic: Sailor Moon The Movie (Independent Short).

This 20-minute not-for-profit short film features Avery Danielle as Bunny/Sailor Moon, Nick Uhas as Darien/Tuxedo Mask, and Liv Rose as Queen Beryl -- all with great costumes and F/X, and an original soundtrack. Not bad for a $5,000 budget, though of course the crucial element in any of these types of productions is the love for the characters that the cast and crew put into it. Read more...

Tags Sailor Moon

Kids sometimes turn up their nose at packed lunches, favoring more "fun" foods like cafeteria-made pizza vegetables. But any child (or child-at-heart) would definitely not trade these fanciful and quite edible works of geeky art for a candy bar or potato chips:

Where The Wild Things Are by AnnaTheRed:

The Muppets by Disney Family:

The Nightmare Before Christmas by Lunchbox Awesome: Read more...

Tags Angry Birds, Bento Box, food, Sailor Moon, The Muppets

2011 was a good year for manga, with some solid shonen and shoujo series making their debut alongside more literary manga aimed at older readers. Here's my hand-picked list of the best manga of 2011, all series that launched either this year or in late 2010.

Gate 7
By CLAMP

Gate 7 has its flaws, no doubt about it—the story takes a while to get moving, and it's not at all clear what's going on at first. The setup—a student who stumbles into a magical realm and turns out to have the greatest powers of all—is not new. What saves it is CLAMP's graceful art and an intriguing storyline that weaves together past and present, all set in the historic district of old Kyoto. (Extensive endnotes help explain the many historical allusions.) By the end of the first volume, CLAMP has brought the ghosts of the past to life and launched an ambitious story. Read more...

Tags best of 2011, CLAMP, Drawn and Quarterly, Fantagraphics, Manga, Mitsuru Adachi, Sailor Moon, Shigeru Mizuki, Vertical, VIZ, wine, Yen Press

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, this is a fairly quiet week for new manga. Viz has finished their manga releases for the week, and Kodansha is holding off on a few until next week. That leaves one very interesting new title from Yen Press and a handful of new volumes in series that have been chugging along for a while.

This is the week when Yen Press releases its November books, and they have a new series debuting this month: The Innocent, a supernatural-mystery series about a detective who was wrongly executed for crimes he didn't commit and who now seeks to save other innocents from a similar fate. If he succeeds, he will have a chance to return to his old life, but he must struggle against his need to seek revenge against those who framed him. This looks like an interesting read for the long weekend. Read more...

Tags Kodansha Comics, Manga, Natsume Ono, Sailor Moon, Vertical, VIZ, Yen Press

From revivals of beloved childhood characters to surprising encounters between pop-culture icons, 2011 was definitely a key year for Geek. Here's our picks for the ten best moments in Geek in 2011:

10. Womanthology Raises over $100,000 on Kickstarter

The significance of this story was two-fold: both demonstrating the power of Kickstarter as a crowd-sourced project-funding tool, and highlighting the issue of a lack of female creators in mainstream comics. Womanthology -- a collection of comics by women spearheaded by artist Renae De Liz -- raised over $100K in only 30 days, far in excess of its original goal of $25,000. Such a massive show of support for women in comics, including celebrity funding contributors Kevin Smith, Jim Lee, and Neil Gaiman, demonstrated that yes, people do want to read and support comic projects by women. With the massive IDW-published anthology on its way to becoming a reality, maybe the next step will be more women actually being hired by mainstream comics publishers.

9. Kevin Keller Mini-Series by Archie Comics

Read more...

Tags Archie Comics, Batman: Arkham City, best of 2011, Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin, Kevin Keller, Miles Morales, New 52, Sailor Moon, Star Trek, Star Wars, Thundercats, Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man, Womanthology

This week's new manga releases to bookstores is short, but there isn't a bad one in the bunch.

This is the week Sailor Moon fans have been waiting for, as vol. 2 of Sailor Moon and vol. 2 of Codename Sailor V hit bookstore shelves. Kodansha also has another book with a very different feel due out this week: Vol. 8 of Ninja Girls, which is one of those stories that is ably summed up by the title—it's about a boy who is sort of a loser until a beautiful ninja girl tells him he is really the heir to the throne, and she and her legions of beautiful ninja girl warriors vow to help him regain his birthright. So basically, Kodansha is all about the girl soldiers this week, although Ninja Girls will probably appeal to a much different set of readers than Sailor Moon.

Read more...

Tags Kodansha, Manga, manga guides, No Starch Press, Sailor Moon, VIZ, Yen Plus, Yen Press

Kodansha Comics joined the digital age yesterday with its own iPad app, and it kicked it off with a special deal, offering all 16 volumes of Fairy Tail at a discounted price of $2.99 per volume.

Dallas Middaugh, director of publishing services for Kodansha Comics, announced the app to a standing-room-only crowd that had come to see Fairy Tail creator Hiro Mashima at the Kodansha panel at New York Comic Con on Friday evening. The app launched at midnight on Friday with four series: Fairy Tail, Arisa, Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei, and Until the Full Moon, and Middaugh promised that more are on the way. The standard price for a volume of manga will be $4.99, and the special discount on Fairy Tail will last for two weeks, until October 28. Read more...

Tags 2011 New York Comic Con, Dallas Middaugh, Digital Comics, Fairy Tail, Hiro Mashima, IPad, Kodansha Comics, Manga, NYCC 2011, Sailor Moon

Online bargains: As I noted earlier this week, the online manga site JManga.com has cut prices for the month of October. You still have to sign up in order to get points ($10 for 1,000 points, plus a bonus, each month), but your points will go farther since they have cut prices from 899 to 499 points for most books. And they have three new ones up there: The first two volumes of Hitohira, a high-school romantic comedy about a shy girl who joins the drama club, which was originally published by Aurora in the U.S.; Sherlock Holmes, a manga take on the classic detective that has two hot guys chasing shadowy, supernatural creatures; and Nogi, an action series. Read more...

Tags Azumanga Daioh, JManga.com, Julietta Suzuki, Manga, Sailor Moon, Takehiko Inoue, Vertical