Even more boys making out with other boys

Everyone's talking about DMP's new releases -- certainly, I wasn't expecting anyone to license Robot, a manga anthology headed by illustrator extraordinaire Range Murata. (It's okay Murata-sensei, we won't talk about your odd predilection for 14-year-old girls in leather bikini tops.) But seriously folks, this one's gonna be pretty if nothing else.

Also, more yaoi!

TCR has the scoop on the Honey Room adult manga obscenity case. (Verdict: guilty.) Where's CBLDF Japan when you need them?

Love Manga rounds up the Bookscan Top 10 so that I don't have to. (just kidding, I love you really!) Interesting that Gravitation and Legal Drug have both cracked the top five. It's boy's-love season all around!

More advance copies! Precocious Curmudgeon checks out Hinako Ashihara's SOS next, and finds that short story shoujo is awesome.

Economic flutter

A couple of companies shut down, the big players ease off on their releases, and The Beat calls it a "manga correction." I call it part of the natural business cycle -- and something that, in any other industry, would hardly be newsworthy except as a brief on the financial pages. It's a sign of a healthy manga market that there's now enough influence to make booksellers stop and think about what they're ordering. And for all the historical comparisons that one might try to draw, remember than nobody ever bought a copy of Some Random Manga Title Vol. 1 because "it might be worth a lot later on." (Except for those weirdos who ask for manga bags-and-boards, maybe...)

AoD has the schoolyard shoot-'em-up drama X-Day at the Bottom of the Pile for this month.

And hey, check out the Flipped forums! Some good, and decidedly non-fanboyish, comictalk going on in there. And this cool little link that offers some straight-out-of-Japan takes on Viz's Shôjo Beat offerings.

Addendum

If you're interested in checking out The Music of Marie but don't have Bittorrent capability, there are also direct HTTP downloads from Myran-san's site. Now there's no excuse not to be reading the best manga that no one else seems to be reading*. (Did that make sense to anyone?)

*Hard disk space and internet speed notwithstanding.

Hikaru On Ice

Tokyopop has preview pages for their upcoming homegrown title, Bizenghast. How delightfully elegant. And gothic.

Plus, you just gotta check this out ... Hotta Yumi, the writer of Hikaru No Go, has just started Yuuto -- a shounen series about speed-skating! And not surprisingly, it's running in the Japanese Shônen Jump. What sport will they think of next?

Love Love

And here's the 101st thing I love about comics: Love Manga has just made its debut on the Comic Weblogs update list, providing a counterpoint of opinion and commentary to my news and notes! A much-welcomed addition to the 'sphere.

For those who like to stay on top of things, Precocious Curmudgeon gets an advance look at Happy Hustle High, one of Viz's latest shôjo offerings.

I try not to place too much emphasis on anime news, but these two are too important to ignore: Watch out for Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the transcendent film based on the manga of the same name. Also, ShoPro/Viz's bajillion-dollar merger has paid off as they go down in history as the company that licensed Naruto.

CPM's upcoming release Angel Shop sounds like a Chobits in reverse gone horribly wrong. Intriguing.

Scanlation fans, start your downloads! Kotonoha has a number of new releases. Some one-shots from an anthology called Comic Cue -- "When I woke up, I found I had turned into a fridge and was in an unknown apartment..." Tell me you wouldn't want to read a story that starts out like that. There's also more The Music of Marie and Flower Cookies.