Yuri Network News – June 19, 2010

June 19th, 2010


I’ll be at AnimeNext this afternoon, wandering around with a bag of goodies to give away (just like a Yuri Santa Claus!) If you see me – I’ll be wearing my black “I Love Yuri” T-shirt – say hello and get…something. No guarantees for quality or worth. If I don’t know you yet, please introduce yourself! Also, if you’re going to be there, please join me at the Promise Sisters’ concert at 4:30 in the Arena. If you’ve been to a Yuricon event any time in the last few years or been to pretty much any con in the NE of America, you know the Promise Sisters. Leanne, Vanessa and Melinda are friends and wow, can they sing!  They’ve won so many karaoke contests that they now perform as a pop idol group. They’ll have some guest singers as well as performing both anime and original songs. I hope to see you there!

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Industry News

You know I don’t go totally off topic too often here, because there are about a zillion people covering the wide world o’manga, and few focusing on Yuri but, there are a few industry round-ups that I really think are worth noting right now.

First of all, thank you everyone who contributed to the comments (here and elsewhere) in a positive and creative way on last week’s post about the Solution to the Scanlation Solution. It’s not at all surprising that many companies are scrambling to be that solution right now.

I wanted to call your attention to this overview of the fallout of the last week. All the links you all need to read have been summed up at The Beat in The Week in Digital: HOLY CRAP. And Matt Blind had a stellar post on the problem with proprietary formats – something he and I were talking about on Twitter, but he and Bruce McF are smarter about it than I am and had a lot more to say.

And, lastly, NPR has a summation of the situation for the uninitiated, that was not only pretty good, but highlights the work of several manga-industry bloggers of note. If you’re not following these blogs…you really should be. Additionally, you can give this article to your significant other/spouse/parent to explain what all the fuss is about.

Really, if the future of digital comics interests you, go read these. We’re in a new pre-Guttenberg press world. We want to be able to read stuff, but the technology isn’t there yet. And companies are hiring as many monks as they can afford to. This is our chance to build the new press.

Thank you for your patience with my digression. Now back to our regularly scheduled Yuri Network News.

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Yuri Anime

Primastea is releasing a new anime, Kuttsukiboshi about two girls on a “risky” vacation. There is a trailer which implies Yuri. It will be service-y without substance, but for the kind of people who like this kind of thing, that will suffice. You can judge for yourself by watching the trailer. The anime ships on August 16th in Japan. The actually amazing thing about the anime is that it was directed, written, and animated by one person. Good bad or indifferent, that makes it worth watching.

Okay, it’s a stretch calling this Yuri, probably, but Queen’s Blade is streaming on Crunchyroll.

Remind me to write about “gatchi Yuri” one day.

(The one thing I absolutely love about Queen’s Blade is that the only things guaranteed to be more infantile and fulls of “boobs” than the series itself are the reviews of the series. My god, do these people read their reviews!?)

So, true to form, 2010 has been a backlash year so far in Japan, with mostly hentai and bouncing breasts on the Yuri anime front.

Thank heavens Maria Watches Over Us, Season 4 is shipping in a few weeks! Miraculously, I have already received my order (thank you friendly little gremlins at RightStuf!) and I will be sure to review it for you in loving detail asap. (Pre-orderers will get a very fetching writing pad as a premium. I bet you all wondered…I know I did!)

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Snatches of Yuri

The novel Vertigo sounds dreadful in every way, so I’m dying to read it. In 2030, public disorder, dystopian future, blah blah, two female cops, fight club, pretend to be a lesbian couple, blah blah. Do want.

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Yuri Manga

There is more info about the planned Yuri Hime move to bi-monthly status. It appears that Yuri Hime and Yuri Hime S will be consolidated into one magazine and released on a bi-monthly basis. This makes excellent financial sense for Ichijinsha and us. They were putting out two quarterly magazines, so we were buy 8 issues a year. Now they will be putting out one bi-monthly, so we’ll be getting 6 issues a year. Both magazines were getting downright huge, so I bet the combined issue is well worth our money. And, I’m kind of glad we’re losing the “for guys”/”for women” gap. We read them both, so….  Although I do admit to being a tad troubled by the current cover of YHS. It might be weird when they try to satisfy both audiences in one magazine.

Hayate x Blade 12 is out in Japan. I know I don’t have to tell you to go get it, do I?

Also, in English, Seven Seas is putting out Hayate x Blade Omnibus volumes, for a very reasonable price. Volume 1 would make a great gift for the wacky kid/lesbian/violent psychotic in your life. Also, more sales is likely to stimulate the possibility of more volumes. Remember – series sell less each volume as a series goes on, so stimulating sales means more money for the company to invest in printing a new volume.

Funniest Yuri news I heard all week is that Senno Knife is putting out a second volume of Lesbian Shoujo-Ai. Read my review of Volume 1 to understand why the news made me laugh. :-)

Of the recent crop of YH Comics, I want to draw attention to Takemiya Jin’s Love Breaker and Amano Shuunta’s sweet guilty love bites. More to come.

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Okazu News

If you take a look  alllllll the way down at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar, you will see a teeny little widget to “Like” Okazu for Facebook folks. Please click. It costs you nothing, feeds my ego and probably doesn’t make a damn bit of difference in the larger scale of things, but I’ll like you more. Thanks. :-)

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Yuri Drama CD

And finally for today, as announced on the obi of the 4th volume of Morinaga Milk’s GIRL FRIENDS, there is an upcoming GIRL FRIENDS Drama CD. Details to follow.

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That’s a wrap for this week.

Become a Yuri Network Correspondent by sending me any Yuri-related news you find. Emails go to anilesbocon01 at hotmail dot com. Not to the comments here, please, or they might be forgotten or missed. There’s a reason for this madness. This way I know you are a real human, not Anonymous (which I do not encourage – stand by your words with your name!) and I can send you a YNN correspondent’s badge.

Thanks to all of you – you make this a great Yuri Network!

8 Responses

  1. DezoPenguin says:

    Happiness was definitely getting in MariMite s4 several weeks early (and it even arrived the day after I got the shipping notice…which was pretty unexpected since I’d shipped it “economy.” @_@ And the mysterious premium item turned out to be something I can use this time! ^_^

    It’ll be interesting to see what the makeup of the “new” Yuri Hime turns out to be–if it’s really balanced between the YH and YHS content or leans more towards one side or another (I’m guessing it’d be the shoujo side that wins out, since, well, it’s the shoujo mag’s title that got kept, but…).

    That’s the second time I’ve heard the phrase “gatchi” Yuri…I still have no idea what it means, though given the context of both uses I’m guessing its meaning, if not its actual definition, is something close to “bleah.” ^_-

    The problem with these HxB omnibuses is, well, I already own the singles (and I’m guessing a fair number of people who know and/or care about the series do as well). Which makes buying the omnibuses basically a charitable donation towards the “license volume seven!” donation box. At least with the Strawberry Panic omnibus there’s some extra content there, but my manga budget really isn’t such that I can just send money to the publisher for the fun of it…Hopefully there’s some audience of people who came in late, or who were on the fence and see the omnibus buy as a good chance to get more pages to the dollar…

  2. Anonymous says:

    here (http://annex.s-manga.net/hayate/ , from 10.06.15 to 10.06.18) it says there’s a new Hayate X Blade Drama Cd coming out along with vol 13…

  3. Thanks for the heads up, Anonymous!

    @DezoPenguin – Re: Gatchi Yuri, I think you’re summation is right on.

    The omnibus volumes aren’t for the folks who buy the individual volumes – they are for folks who hold off for one reason or another, to expand the audience by a few more folks. That is why I suggested them as gifts.

  4. BruceMcF says:

    Docudharma (and soon others): Stumbling toward the future in niche media markets

    Front paged almost immediately – buhdydharma must like the longer pieces.

    BTW, while its not directly Yuri News, I reckon it is highly Yuri Relevant, as quite possibly opening up legit channels for smaller niches that may struggle to cover all the up front costs and overheads of a traditional print run.

  5. I am about the ask something very, very stupid – do you think that the news about publishers and websites trying to utilize a format similar to what you have suggested means that a title like Battle Athletes Victory could actually have an English translation? I watched BAV years and years ago and when I became aware of the manga I was very disappointed to realize it was essentially impossible to find, hence my asking.

    I suppose a better question would be a more general – do you think Japanese publishers would be interested in making available older, out-of-print titles in hopes of deriving even a tiny amount of profit from what would essentially be to them a no-cost venture?

  6. Scareknee says:

    That omnibus edition does look good, and that is a really, really good price for what is essentially 3 manga. I’ll definitely pick it up so I can get started on this series. Thanks for the tip! :)

  7. Cryssoberyl says:

    I’ve repeatedly heard from various sources (female and male) that Queen’s Blade is really more robust in terms of plot and character than one would be led to believe – or at least season 2 is.

    I’ve committed to finding out for myself, although I have not yet started it. In an analogy to the Chandrasekhar Limit in astrophysics, this should be an interesting test of just how massive (i.e. flagrantly oversexualized) electron-degenerate stellar cores (i.e. strong, competant female characters) have to become before yielding to gravitational collapse (i.e. losing all redemptive value as positive depictions of capable womanhood). For reasons of my own, I’m calling this the Kaishaku Limit.

    Fortunately, for me the Kaishaku Limit is very difficult to exceed (at least for creators not called Kaishaku). That is to say, I don’t feel that depictions of strong and independant female characters are compromised by service until it reaches a truly blatantly tasteless degree. So I think the women of QB have a fighting chance to avoid such a complete collapse of redeeming features. I just have to remember that it starts bad and gets better later…

  8. @Cryssoberyl – I think it is fair to say that QB is blatantly tasteless. Despite that, there are some decent bits and the strong women remain strong no matter how much of their armor their wearing. You’ll just have to decided whether it crosses that line for you.

    @A Day Without Me – Not a stupid question at all.

    My *opinion* is that it would behoove publishers to make older, hard to find and out-of-print work available if feasible. There may be limitations in some cases. We don’t know what the contracts with those authors were and there may not be a way to get a legit version of a thing online, but it sure does make sense to try.

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