Kyuuki-chan
Now, for anyone keeping track of the anime and manga industry there's two big bits of news on those fronts.
First off there's the news that Japanese publisher Kodansha will not let Tokyopop continue licensing titles they own. This means there's a lot of manga, some not even done getting translated, Tokyopop has lost the rights to. The good news is many titles were already out of print and many have been picked up by either Dark Horse or Del Rey, the bad news is some titles we have no word on. Among those titles are the Twelve Kingdom novels, one source lists then as OOP and not picked up by anyone, other sources only mention manga titles and give no word on the status of the Twelve Kingdoms novels.
Now, depending on what you're keeping up on or what you've missed out on in the past this could be a good thing, a bad thing, a bit of both, or neither. As upset as I am with the uncertain state of the Twelve Kingdoms novels I'm looking forward to omnibus releases of CardCaptor Sakura as my collection of that isn't complete because my nieces lost some and most of it is the flipped version and, also on the CLAMP front, Rayearth is getting a new release by a new publisher. I sure hope this new version fixes some of the translation flubs from the Tokyopop version that weren't fixed even in their unflipped re-release.
In lighter news, A.D. Vision is no more. It's not as bad as it could be as basically they've chucked that name out and split themselves into smaller companies, each handling different aspects of the process of bringing anime over to North America, even many A.D. Vision employees are working for these new smaller companies. It was a moved necessitated by the backstabbing by their former Japanese partner company, Sojitz, which remained hostile while still holding 20% of the company stock and some other financial issues, some of which were perhaps caused by Sojitz's backstabbing. While it's sad to see the A.D. Vision label leave the scene it's not as tragic as it could be and few if any titles are lost because of this.
That said I'd like to take a moment to complain my copies of the last two volumes of Her Majesty's Dog are on backorder and have been on backorder long enough that the rest of the order got shipped without them. I also am kind of miffed at myself for having taken so long to order the last two DVDs of the Fushigi Yugi TV series my only option now is to order through secondhand sellers as my online store of choice is now out of those volumes. Granted, I'm not likely to get to those episodes anytime soon, but I wanted to trim down the space my anime collection takes up by swapping my old VHS tapes of it (all 16 of them) for the DVDs. The good news is I'm getting the last two volumes of Dragon Knights soon so I'll finally be able to finish that up. At least, finish it up after I reread the series from volume 1 because of how long it's been since I read it last.
