Battle Angel: Last Order has apparently gone on infinite hiatus.
According to Kishiro's blog, as he was busy drawing the 100th issue, and the accompanying magazine cover, he received a phone call from an editor asking to make three small changes to dialogue in the upcoming reprint of the original Battle Angel series. Specifically, to instances of the word "hakkyo" (to go mad) and one use of the English word "psycho." Their reasoning being that these words were associated with schizophrenia. Kishiro asked if they realized that this request could lead to him missing his deadline for the 100th issue, and refusing to allow them to reprint the old series. His editor said yes. Despite this being a work that has already been published twice, this was considered important enough to overturn all the publication plans. Kishiro decided to be professional and meet his deadlines, and allowed the changes to go through. He now regrets it, but admits he would have regretted not allowing them too.
Either way, he posted on his blog that there might not ever be an 101st issue.
Monday, June 28, 2010
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Wow. As someone who dearly loves the series, I'll be sad if that's where it ends, but deadlines or not, that's not cool of editorial and I'll support his decision.
ReplyDeleteNo more physics-mocking space karate?!
ReplyDeleteI am torn. On the one hand, this means Kishiro will stop turning the series into even more of a mockery of the original, but on the other now there is no hope that he'll ever get it together and return to when the story was as good as the art.
ReplyDeleteAm I the only one who finds this an extremely petty reason to stop working on the series? I don't know if people think that this is right and is also proving an important point, but this sounds like a complete overreaction to me.
ReplyDeleteYou're not alone. I can certainly understand being pissed about a change to something that had already been printed without incident...twice. It's a ridiculous change to make, and shouldn't have been necessary.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, it doesn't really seem like something that would create a permanent rift, even with someone as notoriously delicate as Kishiro. I suspect giving him basically less than a day to make a decision was a bigger issue for him than the proposal. And his tone implies the situation runs a little deeper than the inciting incident. Hard to say, really.
I hope he takes a few months off, enjoys a vacation, figures out what he wants to do with Last Order, and comes back firing on all cylinders. He's done it before.
You all are aware that on the Anime News Network, and on Kishiro's blog, that he is going to resume the series with Kodansha, right? He will no longer be publishing with his original publisher, but the series is continuing.
ReplyDeleteThat also means that there will be a huge gap in publishing overseas again. SInce VIz is apparently owned by Kishiro's old publishing company, they will not publish past 14 or 15. So a bunch of rights will have to be worked out with another publisher, but with the way BAALO has been selling (12 and 13 were both on the NYT top 10 best-sellers list for manga their first week), someone will pick it up. Hopefully!