Look, I’m still jet-lagged, so although there is a TON of news, this week’s report will be short. Bear with me while I re-assimilate to this time zone.
Live Action Yuri
The big news in the world of Yuri this week is the announcement of a Live-Action Maria-sama ga Miteru movie, as announced in this Cobalt Salon ad. (PDF) And there is already a movie website, with the lead actresses listed: Miki Honoka as Yumi and Haru as Sachiko. I note that the leads appear to be teen idols who modeled for young men’s magazines. There are an endless supply of women who become idols and end up doing that kind of modeling – the actresses from the Live-Action Sailor Moon were found through the same route. It pretty much guarantees interest from a male audience for what is otherwise just another chick movie.
And thanks to ANN for ferreting out that Kakera: A Piece of Our Life, the movie based on Erica Sakurazawa’s Love Vibes, will be showing at Raindance and is going to have a UK theatrical release, followed by a DVD release. (Trailer here.)
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Yuri Manga
YNN Correspondent Darkchibi07 notes that Ichijinsha’s Yuri Hime Website has a nice new feature. If you click a volume on the scrolling banner, it leads you to a page on the Ichinjinsha store – if there is a GREEN link on that page, click that and you will be able to read that volume for free with their online e-reader. No, there are no translations – this is after all a Japanese manga, on a Japanese site, for a primarily Japanese market. (I will refrain from once again explaining why fansubs are not really connected to sales and I’ll ask that you please refrain from insisting that if the publisher put time and money into translating an e-edition into English it would somehow translate to better sales. Thanks.)
Takemiya Jin’s collection Girlish Sweet is available for pre-order. I love his work – although I don’t think he’s ever going to surpass his amoral/evil Noriko fan works with any of his original stuff. I keep hoping though!
Three new Ichijinsha comics about which I know nothing are slated for release this month: Kimi Koi Limit, YuriPop and Honey Inferno. I suppose I should actually read the ads in Yuri Hime one day…. Also I note that Raubritter, another Ichijinsha publication was came out while I was in Japan, but although I saw it, I just blanked. For some reason, I remember the cover putting me off.
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Other News
Manga Curmudgeon David Welsh came up with JiriRabu, a comic about gay married-in-all-but-name life by a gay guy in Japan. I thought it interesting enough to share. ;-)
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That’s a wrap for this week.
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Jirilove does look very interesting. It made me think of Fufu (being about a gay married-in-all-but-name couple going about their daily lives) and Honey&Honey (as far as it being written by an out gay man to educate people about his daily life using humor, and being drawn in a relatively simple, non-typical manga art style). Thanks for pointing it out here!
Thanks for the link, Erica!
And Katherine, I’d love to hear more about Fufu.
@David Welsh – I wrote about “Fufu” in some detail here: http://bit.ly/aYaqlB
The second chapter, which I haven’t yet written about is just as good.
Marimite live action? I have mixed feelings about this. I want it to be good, but I’m also dreading it a little.
About Marimite movie:
Please mind that both ‘LOVE BERRY’ and ‘Seventeen’ (the journals the actresses belong to) are young girl fashion magazines (‘Seventeen’ in a more high-schooler oriented, ‘LOVE BERRY’ – middle schooler). Plus ‘Seventeen’ is Shueisha-owned (and probably read by the same girls that read Cobalt/Margaret).
So, if it’s not an April’s Fool Day joke, the movie probably will not be that bad. And Marimite has actually lost a lot of it’s male audience (there’re are a lot of much-cuter-and-easier-to-understand series like K-ON! etc., plus Touhou’s Yuriness raised considerably), so it won’t be a major factor.