This week’s issue of Publisher’s Weekly Comics Week has two items of note for manga fans. One is a profile of the new manga publisher Aurora Publishing:
The new titles include Walkin’ Butterfly, a girls comic (shojo manga), and Hate to Love You by popular yaoi manga-ka Makoto Tateno, a guest at last year’s Otakon convention in Baltimore. Hate to Love You, a one-volume title, will introduce Aurora’s yaoi imprint, Deux. And Aurora’s general manager, Mikako Ogata, also plans to bring a new genre of girls comics to the U.S. called Teens Love, mature romance stories intended for an older female audience. Teens Love is Aurora’s attempt at attracting a female readership that isn’t into yaoi, but is ready for more visually stimulating romance. “It’s a little bit explicit,” Ogata explained. “It’s love stories and relationships, but sexy, a little bit erotic. Girls here don’t have anything like that.”
The other story looks at Shojo Beat’s first anniversary and includes this tasty tidbit:
Shojo Beat, Viz Media’s monthly shojo anthology magazine, will celebrate its second birthday in July with a special present for its readers: an excerpt from legendary manga-ka Osamu Tezuka’s 1954 manga Princess Knight, which has never been available in the U.S. before. It’s a way to show its readers the roots of shojo manga (manga generally aimed at girls) at a time when the magazine is renewing its focus on manga and the Japanese popular culture that produced it.
That’s a series I’ve been dying to see ever since I read about it in Fredrick Schodt’s Dreamland Japan.
Also in PWCW: A preview of the second 24Seven anthology; an interview with Peter Kuper, author of “Stop Forgetting to Remember”; and a chat with Dean Mullaney, “King of the Reprints.”
