Comic Salon and More

The Comic Salon 2008 is coming up! The biennial comic convention will take place in Erlangen from May 22nd until 25th. The three big German manga publishers will be present and some of them have star guests attending, one of them being Eiki Eiki via Egmont. She’ll sign autographs at the respective panel throughout the convention and on Sunday there will be an interview held.

New Licenses for Fall & Winter 2008/2009

As the last of the three big German publisher Carlsen released their list of new licenses today. I will again not order the releases by publisher, but instead by genre. This time it’s not as colorful as the post before, as I only list the three major German publishers (and because the others have yet to announce any new licenses).

Manga Release List for May!

March had no seinen releases at all, April a few, but May is full of sexy seinen manga: 9 different releases! Most of them are on my shopping list, but there are even more interesting titles released this month, alas my financial situation is only permitting to be interested and not more. I guess I’ll have to wait for a month with less seinen releases to catch up again.

Shopping List Returns for May

Yup, yup it does! After an April without any manga purchases, May is full of them, and by full, I mean PACKED. 9 manga with two new series, lots of manly seinen action, spiced up with some mindless shounen; in other words: a great month!

Quick News from Manga Germany

News 1: Tokyopop named four of their new licenses for Fall/Winter 2008. Two are shounen and the other two are shoujo. For more licenses we’ll have to wait till the end of April/start of May, when Carlsen will announce their new acquisitions and Tokyopop the rest.

Manga Articles and More…

Spiegel Online, the online portal of Germany’s leading and Europe’s biggest weekly magazine, recently (at least when I started to write this post) published another article from their reports on German mangaka. However instead of posting a link to one article, I will use the chance to list their other articles. All articles are in German, but even if you don’t understand German you can check out the art samples.

I’m personally not a fan of German manga, not because they are German, but rather because their stories lack a certain touch and uniqueness. They often either try to emulate a Japanese setting or “japanize” German settings (might be a reason why no work by a German mangaka was in the Top 20 of Kodansha’s 2ndmanga award). I’m not very fond of the art either, it’s mediocre, which is not enough, esp. if paired with a boring story. It’s maybe not even the mangaka’s fault but rather the fact that their target group is 14 year old girls and I’m very far from being one ;). Well, enough of my blabbering here’s the list:

German Manga Releases for April

Carlsen’s, Tokyopop’s and Heyne’s releases are already available in the stores, while for Panini’s and Egmont’s one will have to wait until mid-April to purchase them. Sadly none of the seinen titles released this month are on my shopping list. Berserk surely is interesting, but it’s just a re-edition of the older volumes, which I own. I never liked the Hellsing art, so I never thought of buying it. Oh! My Goddess is too light-hearted, slow and basically just plain boring. I won’t even mention xxxHolic…its story & illustration is by Clamp… n/c.

Carlsen’s Bestsellers for 2007

The list below was posted by a Carlsen official a few weeks ago and I had totally forgotten about it until someone bumped it up again and I thought it is interesting to see that Carlsen’s own productions sold so well.

German Manga Charts for January & February

With a *cough* little *cough* delay, here are the German Manga Charts for January and February. Yes! You heard right for January AND February (Via splashcomics.de)!

The Shopping List Marches

So now that we all are familiar with the German releases in March, here’s my shopping list for the same month. March got rather heavy, with 9 definite purchases, 10 if you count Taniguchi’s release as two (2x price, 2x pages), that’s 3 more than last month and 8 more than in January!