Aside from the excellent news of Takako Shimura's Hourou Musuko/Wandering Son and more of Moto Hagio's work -- I recall someone (Ed Chavez of Vertical?) mentioning that her titles were difficult to acquire -- the most interesting bit is that Matt Thorn will be overseeing the line of manga which comes straight from Shogakukan.
Maybe seeing Hideki Arai's The World is Mine or Kiichi!! isn't a hopeless dream...
Sweet. Always nice to see underserved niches becoming a little less so.
ReplyDeleteMatt Thorn's a passionate guy, and has been championing shojo and josei manga since before anyone here knew they existed. Definitely glad to see initiatives like this led by the people that care about the stuff.
ReplyDeleteThe most promising thing aside from their deal with Shogakukan (and Enterbrain considering Hourou Musuko? They're certainly dealing with other companies) is that Hagio's library is at least open partially. I've really enjoyed everything that I've read from her, but North America hasn't even seen her most acclaimed work (the Hanshin short story aside).
ReplyDeleteBy any luck, we might see a josei market really open up here along with the growing amount of seinen titles.
Excellent news!
ReplyDeleteMatt Thorn is a first-rate scholar and a passionate fan at the same time and there is no better choice.
I want to read some longer Hagio's work (Zankoku na kami ga shihai suru), but a collection of short stories may be better for the beginning.
It would be AMAZING if we could get some of Arai's works over here.
ReplyDeleteThe World is Mine coming in five super size volumes with the interviews with Arai instead of the 14 original would be super nice, and would somewhat bypass the problem of the first volume and a half or so being hard to get into. Plus I really, really want to read that interview.