At Edelstein boarding school, the schoolboys wear lip-gloss, the headmistress has a weakness for homoerotic comic books, and there is only one subject: how to serve female visitors.

Yes it is another story on those maid cafes for women in Tokyo. Pullquotes galore.

“Most of our customers are office ladies in their twenties and thirties, women who are fashionable but normal,” said Emiko Sakamaki, Edelstein’s 27-year-old manager, herself dressed in a loose mini-dress over skinny jeans and knee-high boots.

Based on focus groups and surveys, The second New York Anime Festival will be held this year September 12-14th, significantly earlier than last year’s Dec. 7-9 time frame. According to the calendar at Comic Book Conventions.com there are no real scheduling conflicts with other shows, although it is coming pretty soon after Otakon which is being held August 8-10 in Baltimore. According to the PR, below, NYAF is now the fourth biggest anime show. Anime Expo and Otakon would be bigger, but what’s #3?

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Following up yesterday’s charts, our HTML is still less than desired, but here is Diamond’s year end chart for the Top 50 Manga. Although Viz dominates, Tokyopop claims the top spot with FRUITS BASKET Vol. 16.

On the other hand, if women in comics are responsible for this kind of thing, then we must say it is time to call a halt:

June Manga invites you to join the Mile High Club in All Nippon Airlines: Paradise at 30,000 Feet by Kei Azumaya!

ANAL – All Nippon Air Lines – is a unique airline company. All of its employees are beautiful gay men. On top of that, relationships between employees, or even between passengers and employees, are highly encouraged! This is of course the premise for many hilarious situations and strange adventures both for them and for their passengers.

“This is pretty much all the staff member’s favorite title to work on this year,” explains production manager Fred, “It has gotten us into all kinds of trouble with its somewhat controversial title!”

To celebrate the release, June Manga is producing a limited edition dust jacket. “The bookstores didn’t want to actually see ANAL written on the cover,” explains sales manager Eric. “But the play on words is what really makes the book unique. We figured a limited edition dust jacket would be a way to give the fans what they want, but also make the bookstores happy.”

DMP/June is the publisher behind this effort.

• ANN reports that Newtype USA, the glossy, oversized manga-culture magazine is to cease publication — but ADV will replace it.

Representatives of A.D. Vision (ADV) have contacted retail partners to inform them that the February issue of Newtype USA will be the last. At this time, it is unclear if this refers to the official February issue, which is set to go on sale later this month, or the March issue, which would go on sale in February.

According to reports from those contacted by ADV, the company is planning to replace Newtype USA with another magazine. No information about the new magazine has been made public.

UPDATE: The new magazine will be called PiQ according to a latter published on MangaBlog :

Thank you for your email to Newtype USA!

We will be launching a new magazine that will be on sale in mid-March. Titled PiQ, the magazine will cover anime, manga, video games and other aspects of pop culture of keen interests to you. All existing subscribers will have their remaining issues fulfilled at a two-to-one ratio, meaning you will get double the number of magazines delivered straight to your doorstep! We hope you stick with us and give the new magazine a shot. We’re sure you’ll love it!

• Fantagraphics Books will be relaunching their website any day now, and it sounds pretty slick:

Here are just a few of the things you can look forward to:

- Feature content (such as interviews and book spotlights)
- Real Flog permalinks
- Flog commenting
- All of our in-stock releases having individual pages that you can link to, with much more detailed information about our backstock, larger cover images that you can click to view, and previews of recent and selected books
- Better navigation with category pages for artists, series, interests, etc.
- Vastly improved Search
- Webcomics, expanded previews and specials available exclusively to registered users

Seriously, you’re going to plotz.

Golgo 13 and James Bond: Separated at birth? Above, a page from Saito’s THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN

Via The Vault of Buncheness

UNDERTOWN, the OEL/OGM manga by Jim Pascoe and Jake Mylar will be the lastest syndicated strip for Tokyopop, as this press release reveals. The book has also been picked up by Scholastic for their book club.

If the first name that comes to mind when you think of Sunday comic strips is Peanuts, you haven’t been tuned into the manga revolution that has been drawing kids back to the funny pages.

Jim Pascoe announced today that his original English-language manga UNDERTOWN will be the new property running in TOKYOPOP’s syndicated slot starting this Sunday, January 6, 2008. Since 2005, TOKYOPOP has provided a rotating selection of manga to Universal Press Syndicate, which distributes comics and columns globally to newspapers.

Over 50 papers plan to carry Undertown, including the Los Angeles Time, Denver Post, Vancouver Sun and Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

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If you look closely the book he’s carrying is some kind of book about Dragons. Luckily, Wacko Jacko has not yet discovered yaoi.

Last weekend’s New York Anime Festival was an interesting experience to say the least. It was only the second anime show I’ve ever attended (I went to Otakon in Baltimore a few years ago) so the hypotheses I drew from the experience can hardly be called conclusions. I welcome corrections or deeper observations. But the one thing I can say with some certainty is that I wish there had been more people from Marvel and DC there. (There were a few people from Marvel and I spotted DC’s new SVP of sales and Marketing Steve Rotterdam taking in a few panels, but that was about it.) It was a real eye opener and no mistake.

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Tintin Pantoja may not have gotten that Wonder Woman gig, but her mangafied version of Hamlet is coming out next year from Wiley. Here’s a preview from Active Anime

Long, long ago it was announced that DDGB (aka Gerard Butler) would be starring in an adaptation of the manga PRIEST. At NYAF we heard that this is not happening, although you probably could have figured that out.

This may have been a con too far for The Beat…we’re too tuckered to post anything, but we will run some photos by you, how does that sound? Although we apologize in advance because our camera settings were screwed up all weekend and all the pictures came out dark. Above: An overview of the hall.

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Yep, it was true, Marvel and Del Rey announced a small — four book — but brainy venture. A shojo manga version of the X-men written by Raina Telegemeier and Dave Roman with art by Anzu, and a Wolverine shonen manga written by Antony Johnston. Both series are planned for Spring 2009 and will run for two volumes. Both will reimagine the characters for a YA manga audience, while keeping the elements that have made them so popular.

Below are some of Anzu’s VERY preliminary character sketches for the X-men. Wolverine is positively bishonen — it’s our understanding that he won’t be appearing in the shojo X-men book, however we missed the very start of the panel so we may be wrong on this.

Official PR in the jump.

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We’ll have our own detailed anthropological observations when we’re not feeling under the weather. However here are facts and figures.

§ ICv2 interviews the showrunner John McGeary who estimates attendance at 15,000.

§ IGN reports on Stuart Levy’s amusing activites:

Have the Tokyopop convention planners lost their minds? Not really. Rather than do a typical presentation, Levy wanted to film a “documentary” chronicling a fake Van Von Hunter’s journey from “rags to riches”. But Levy wanted audience participation and guided them to create the footage he wanted. Attendees were prompted to boo on cue, shout lines, throw giveaway armbands and, finally, rush the door as Hunter, Levy and panelist Steven Calcote ran outside, using chairs as “riot shields.” The entire ordeal was filmed through two cameras and, oddly enough, featured relatively little about the manga itself (which is very real). The final Hunter documentary is due to be released in 2008. The manga series, first released in 2005, follows the humorous action-adventures of a hero who hunts evil monsters across the Kingdom of Dikay.

§ The Del Rey crew has a detailed blog.

§ The winner of the World Cosplay Summit US Division blogs.

§ Who attended the show? This LJ post really says it all:

So. Yesterday morning I took the ACT again. When I was done, my parents and I spent an hour stuck in NYC traffic in order to go to the con. When we finally got there (and found a place to park, and cursed out all the people who came in buses) I made a beeline for the nearest manga booth (Emma vol.5, +Anima vol. 6, Apothecarius Argentum vol. 3, Sugar Sugar Rune vol. 7). And then I found shadow_maw, ditched my parents, and we set off to explore the con.

Brigid and various folks have been going to panels and gathering news. Brigid has GO! Comi’s new licenses, ComiPress has Del Rey’s early announcements. Deb Aoki at About.Com has Viz’’s news, which includes new maga by the ceators of Rurouni Kenshin and Death Note. ANN has complete team coverage as well as Media Blaster’s plans for Genshiken. ANN also has breaking news of parental complaints about a bookstore’s manga section, and a US House proposal to limit the import of child pr0n:

The United States House of Representatives passed a bill on Wednesday that would expand the online enforcement against “any image of any apparent child pornography.” In Japan, a government research panel on the unification of telecommunications and broadcast laws called for legislation to regulate “harmful materials” on the Internet on Thursday. Both efforts could affect manga and anime that depict fictional, explicit content.

We’ll have more of a wrap-up of the show tomorrow. Saturday was quite busy, but a big question remains dealer sales, as one poster alluded to. Del Rey and Marvel are announcing whatever it is they are doing later today and we’ll tell you what it is if it’s of any interest.

[Top photo nicked from LJinto’s Flickr sgtream.]

The first day of the inaugural New York Anime Festival was a busy one. Crowds were good for a brand new show on a cold, snowy day, which was, in the end, competing against Christmas shopping. That sounds like damning with faint praise, but there were people throughout the hall all day–all in all, one of the better showings for a new show we’ve seen in New York. Total attendance for the weekend is expected to be about 12-14,000, and everyone expects to be slammed today (Saturday.)

No real news we heard all day, The real experience of an anime show is for the fans, and shows generally have a “by fans for fans” feeling. Although this is a “commercial” show, as it is being run by Reed Exhibitions, the kids were in their crazy costumes (above) and seemed enthusiastic. We had to leave before the big masquerade, alas. A few more pictures in the jump.

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The day began with a tediously long crosstown jaunt over to the Javits Center that took 30 minutes to go 10 blocks. WHY do taxi drivers INSIST on going crosstown on 31st St.? Even a bus moves faster on 34th. I asked my driver and he said 34th was the worst because you can’t make a left hand turn. We don’t understand what that has to do with being stuck behind a truck delivering gladiolas for 15 minutes…but…we disgress.

We started the day with a strategy session with the All-Star team we have assembled to cover this show: Kai Ming Cha! Calvin Reid! Brigid Alverson! Ed Chavez! Erin Finnegan! Laurel Maury! Laura Hudson! (We aren’t really manga experts, so we’re not part of the all-star team.) At 1ish the manga troops started assembling, from Tpop, Viz, Del Rey, Yen and near and far.

Milton Griepp kicked things off with a “white paper.”
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Here’s that manga publishing pact we were talking about yesterday, as scooped by PW’s Calvin Reid: Tor Books has signed up Seven Seas to produce a line of 6-8 manga a month:

Science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor Books announced plans to enter the U.S manga market by creating a new manga imprint with Seven Seas Entertainment, an independent publisher of original and licensed manga, manga-inspired prose titles and illustrated juvenile fiction based in Los Angeles. The new venture will release original manga titles, but also plans to compete for top Japanese manga licenses such as the first volume of the Takashi Okzaki’s popular Afro Samurai manga series which it will release in August 2008. The Afro Samurai manga is the basis for the popular Spike TV anime series that premiered in 2007 and features the voices of actors Samuel L. Jackson, Ron Perlman and Kelly Hu.

Lots of connections on this deal which was put together by “Tor publisher Tom Doherty, Macmillan v-p of merchandise and sales Steve Kleckner and Seven Seas founder and president Jason DeAngelis.” Kleckner was ones the sales guy at Tokyopop so he knows manga. Macmillan (which owns Tor)also distributes Hill & Wangs non fiction GN line, and First Second; they also distribute D&Q and NBM’s ya Papercuts line — so this gives them a full range of graphic novel genres, soup to nuts.

Yet another best selling author James Patterson, is setting up his own toon/graphic novelly/manga deal. Patterson has sold some 140 million books, so that is a lot of books. One deal is with Yen Press (PR in the jump) which will serialize his “Maximum Ride” YA series in their manga anthology, Yen Plus.

He’s also pacted with with Curious Pictures:

…the Gotham animation studio known for Disney’s “Little Einsteins,” is teaming with James Patterson Entertainment to produce longform animated media based on the author’s books, graphic novels and original concepts.

The pair’s first project is the film “Beer Belly and Fat Boy,” about a slacker who is secretly an assassin controlled by evil corporations. Like “300,” the pic will blend human actors with all-digital backgrounds, aiming squarely at the vidgame-and-comedy-inclined young male demo.

As interesting as all that is, the article also contains this little nugget:

[Curious] is doing animation work for a toon Michel Gondry is co-directing with his son, Paul, an up-and-coming artist.

Michel Gondry ‘toon! We are there.
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You think it was spring the way folks are pacting up. A very big manga business deal is being announced today, but you’ll have to read Publishers Weekly daily for the scoop. In the meantime, a close reading of the NYAF programming schedule reveals….this:

Del Rey & Marvel Comics
Join Del Rey Manga and Marvel Comics for a special announcement!
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Sunday, Dec 9
Manga Panel Room

Are they announcing a new Hulk-flavored onigiri? What!

We’re going to spend much of the next four days at the Javits center for the inaugural New York Anime Fest, kicking off today with Milton Griepp’s ICv2 Conference on Anime and Manga. This is a major event from Reed Exhibitions, which also puts on NY Comic-Con (and a sister company of PW, which hosts this blog.) Big anime events in New York have had a spotty track record in the last few years, but all of the big publishers and producers are in for this one, there are lots of guests, and a wide array of events, including the American leg of the World Cosplay Summit!

You can see the HUGE lineup of programming here. Guests are here.

To be candid, we’re not too well prepared for this show. All signs point to a big success, but since it’s a new show on the calendar, we didn’t prep for it much. We were all “Oh, it’s baby Max;s first birthday!” and “Oo, Elisa and George are having a holiday party!” and now it’s “Panel panel panel and then drinks with soanso and dinner with soanso!” But that’s okay. We will be bringing you extensive coverage from the floor. ANN, Brigid Alverson, Kai-Ming Cha and the other top manga journos will all be there as well, and we’ll link to their sure-to-be excellent coverage.

In lieu of a big preview, here are two links from Pop Culture Shock: Five things to do at New York Anime Fest and Erin Finnegan’s New Manga Map of NYC

In the world of manga, Takehiko Inoue is a mega-superstar. His basketball manga SLAM DUNK was so successful it made he sport itself more popular in Japan. It’s sold over 100 million copies worldwide and has been voted the #1 all-time manga. VAGABOND, telling the legend of swordman Miyamoto Musashi has also been a smash hit. He’s even been listed among Japan’s top tax-payers.

Mangaka of his level rarely come to America and it’s even more rare for them to do press with American outlets (or usually, any press at all.) Thus when Inoue-sensei came to New York to paint a mural for the new Kinokuniya Books on 6th Avenue, and Viz made him available for interviews, it was a singular chance to talk to one of the world’s most successful cartoonsits. This opportuniy was so unusual that The Beat decided to team up with PW Comics Week’s Kai-Ming Cha for a tag team interview! You can read the first part of the interview here.

The occasion was also to announce the launch of a major initiative to publish Inoue’s work here in the states. SLAM DUNK will soon appear in tankubon format; VAGABOND has finished its 25 book run, but will have a new omnibus edition next year; and Viz has announced an American edition of REAL, a manga about wheelchair basketball players.

Inoue’s website even has a section in English where you can read his blog (his latest posting takis about his trip to New York), and the complete run of BUZZER BEATER, another basketball comic, is also online.

The interview time was brief, and due to the constraints of translation, the interview itself is short, but Inoue-sensei was very engaged and engaging, and the entire event definitely opened doors — both ways.

PWCW: You’ve also done work for Shiseido cosmetics - commercials where you paint large scale pictures on huge swaths of paper.  Can you talk about your development as an artist?  How did you go from drawing for something so compact like a comic, to something so large like in the Shiseido commercials?

Takehiko Inoue: I’m an artist so it’s basically the same.  It’s all drawing.  But when it’s so large scale like in the Shiseido commercials, it’s like a sport.  I have to think ‘how do I move this brush to draw a straight line?’  It becomes more physical.


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Yesterday we were lucky enough to be invited to a press junket for Viz’s new edition of Slam Dunk, and we got to interview Takehito Inoue himself. Slam Dunk–a basketball themed manga that once ran in Raijin magazine, but is coming back in the American Shonen Jump–has sold a mere 100 million copies world wide and is credited with sparking the popularity of basketball in Japan. Inoue is one of the best selling cartoonists of all times — his other works in include Vagabond and REAL– and to be honest, we’ve never met a mangaka on his level, and we were nervous about what to ask him. The biggest Japanese manga artists aren’t celebrities like our cartoonists — they are more like rock stars, and travel with entourages and expect only the finest treatment. Would we offend with our questions?
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We missed this the other day, but a Dragonball Z movie has been confirmed with Stephen Chow to produce and James Wong (The One)to direct. Justin Chatwin (War of the Worlds) stars as Goku, and James Marsters (Spike on Buffy) plays bad guy Piccolo.

Based on the manga by Akira Toriyama, Dragonball Z has been a multi platform sensation in books, video games, toys and cartoons. We’ve never been able to make sense of it, but that must mean it’s good! According to the THR piece, it’s generated some $4 billion in worldwide licensing. We’re happy to hear of Chow’s involvement, since he’s one of the finest moviemakers on the planet for this kind of action genre romp.

Our advice to Chatwin? Stock up on the hair gel!

The New York Anime Festival is fast approaching (December 7-9) and the programming  schedule has just been posted.

Even if you’re not a manga or anime fan there’s lot of interest here, including Milton Griepp’s ICv2 Conference on Anime and Manga on the 6th, and panels on Gekiga and other types of manga during the show.

The New York Anime
Festival is sponsored by ADV Films, Anime Innovation Tokyo, Anime Insider, Anime Network, Anime News
Network, AnimeNEXT, BookExpo America, Diamond Book Distributors,
Entertainment Consumers Association, FUNimation Entertainment, ICv2,
ImaginAsian, Kinokuniya Bookstores, License! Global, Manga Video, New York
Comic Con, NEW YORK - TOKYO, Newtype
USA, Publishers Weekly, Starz
Media, THINK Corp, TOKYOPOP, Video
Business, VIZ Media, Wedge Holdings, Wizards of the Coast, and the World
Cosplay Summit.
 

The New York Anime
Festival’s Guests of Honor include Peter Fernandez, Corinne Orr, Kobun Shizuno,
and Aimee Major Steinberger.  The
New York Anime Festival’s musical guests include HAPPYFUNSMILE, UNICORN TABLE,
and Voltaire.

Disclaimer: NYAF is put on by the same folks as the New York Comic-Con and BEA, who we’ve worked with in the past and they are owned by the same parent company as PW.