I'm In Love With Illusions

The Ghost Hunt manga will end in Japan this month. It's perhaps alittle sad but they were running out of light novels to adapt stories from. And, as a NA manga buying fan, it looked as if Del Rey - even with their suddenly erratic behavior - might have been able to finish out the series. Volume 11 comes out in November and the last volume could come out next year. Right?

WHATWHATWHAT!. Final volume you say? Fuck! Perhaps there is a real explanation for this. But after cancelling volumes 17 and 18 of Nodame without warning, I'm expecting that explanation to be kind of crappy.

Tokyopop gets their shit together - niche series are being put out again (more Suppli in February after two volumes in June, Aria comes out again in December) and the paper supply has greatly improved - and Del Rey starts to fall apart. Can we only rely on -shudder- Viz*?*

*Not to discount Yen Press but they are quite young in the scheme of things

Aria volume 5 is finally going to be released in November. Yay! Well, not such a happy yay. Having recently looked at/held a few of Tokyopop's new releases, I have major issues with the cheap, see-though paper that they're using. The books felt flimsy and you could nearly roll one up as tight as you can a magazine. You can see an example here. I really love Aria but I don't see being able to read two front/back pages at once to be a printing virtue. And if they release the final volume of Furuba with this paper...ouch! It's going to get ugly.

Flicker Alley will release the John Gilbert double feature (Bardley's the Magnificant and Monte Cristo) on July 7. It's great to see Gilbert getting some DVD love outside of his films with Garbo (even if Gilbert+Garbo=absolute on-screen magic). Flicker Alley's page.

Tomoko Ninomiya is launching a mini-series based on Nodame Cantabile supporting characters. I am unable to say no to more Nodame. This should be very interesting.

New Futurama for 2010. One one hand, I'm super excited because I really love Futurama. On the other hand, the movies ranged from being merely good to lackluster. Much of the problem there seemed to revolve around making the movies reduce down to four episodes. Such an arrangement didn't make for coherent, seamless storytelling. Hopefully moving back into the season/episode format will realign storytelling to something like it was in the past.