Yuri Network News – May 5, 2012

May 5th, 2012

Happy Children’s Day!


Yuri Manga

In a slightly different take on JManga, Michelle and Melinda over at Manga Bookshelf take a look at some of the Yuri titles on their Off the Shelf: BL GL Bookrack column.

From Dan Kanemitsu on Twitter, The Witches of Andorra, a spinoff manga of Strike Witches by Togeshi Nogami has been released on Nico Nico Channel’s Kadokawa Magazine in English.

The July Comic Yuri Hime  (コミック百合姫) is up for pre-order. It will be released on June 18th.

My Pure Lady, Volume 13 has a story about an affair between two women. No clue yet about quality and I’d guess not a happy ending.

And there’s a new Yuri anthology on the block, Yuri Anthology – dolce (百合アンソロジー dolce). The name alone leads me to believe it’s by the folks that brought us Feuille, Petale, etc.

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Yuri Event

The Live Online Yuri Panel last weekend was a total hoot. All 5 parts of the Panel have been uploaded to Yuri Studio channel on Youtube and to a dedicated page on Yuricon. We’ll definitely be doing that again. In fact, we already have a question or two for the next time. Go ahead and send your questions in to us at yuricon at gmail dot com – use the  subject “Yuri Panel.”

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Yuri Anime

YNN Correspondent Steven D sent us this kind of amazing news: “I’ve been watching Nyarko-san: Another Crawling Chaos on Crunchroll and it’s with mixed feelings that I bring it to your attention that there is, technically, Yuri in it. For clarification’s sake I say “technically” because they’ve given genders to unspeakable horrors from beyond the stars. Both Nyarlathotep (Nyarko), described by Lovecraft as a “mad faceless god” and never having a consistent form, and Cthugha (Kuko), described by Lovecraft as a ball of living fire, are personified as teenage girls and Kuko is in love with (read: obsessed over) Nyarko (who is in turn obsessed over Mahiro [the boy who suddenly has girls living at his house]). So yeah, the Yuri in the show is the creepy/obsessive kind, though it is used as a mirror for Nyarko’s own creepy/obsessiveness towards Mahiro instead of being just for fan-service. To it’s credit Mahiro’s classmates (because of the inevitable transferring into his class by Nyarko and Kuko) don’t bat an eye at Kuko’s declaration that she’s Nyarko’s wife and Nyarko’s objection towards Kuko’s advances never go into “but we’re both girls so we can’t” territory. Hence mixed feelings.The thing this show’s best at though is draining away the sanity of its viewers.”


For more mixed feelings, I also suggest watching Jormungand on Funmation’s streaming channel. (You will need to register, but that’s all.) Stylistically, it’s just like the manga, so Valmet’s feeling for Koko are intact.

The trailer for the second season of Yuru Yuri anime has gone live. “Mixed feelings” seems to be the anime theme of the day.

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Yuri Doujinshi

Steven also wants you all to know about a doujinshi buying service that is importing doujinshi (as opposed to illicit downloads,) called Doujinpress.The stock is heavy on the Yuri. They are based in Sacremento, California and seem to be attending some local events there, if you want to see what they have aside from shopping online. They also have a printing service, which is a cool feature.

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Other News

ANN reports a cyber-crane game launched in Japan that charges 100 yen for a go at prizes from Nanoha, Strike Witches, To Aru Kagaku no Railgun, among other Yuri-friendly series through a browser. I’m gonna guess that it’s Japan-only because shipping the prizes overseas would be very expensive. ^_^

There’s this thing called the Aniblog Tourney that pitches various blogs against each other. This week Okazu is one of the blogs and if you aren’t opposed to voting in kind of meaningless polls about such things, please vote for Okazu!

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That wraps it up 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.

8 Responses

  1. Mandy says:

    Holy moses, Doujinpress prices are expensive! Though I guess it makes sense, given importing and currency costs as well as profit for them. But wow! Great selection, though, I’m very tempted. But I think I’d prefer to pick out my manga through an importer myself. As long as I buy like 20+ items, it’d be cheaper than using their service.

    Speaking of which… oh man, looking through the site made me want stuff so bad. Must… resist…

  2. @Mandy – That’s exactly why I have never gone into reselling Yuri doujinshi myself. I pay (let’s say, for argument’s sake) $10 and then bring it home. Even if I buy it first-hand and don’t have to ship it home, I still have to send it to you, and fees for $ processing, which means the cost is now closing in on $15. If I sell it for $20, it feel like I’m ripping you off, but I’d only be making $5 and that’s including all the time and effort it took me. And if it *don’t* sell, I’m stuck with it.

    Any kind of import/export sales is expensive, because you have to pay the cost of the item, shipping to the reseller, the cost of processing and shipping to you, the cost of the time and effort of the reseller and a profit so it is worth their time.

    This is why I go to events in Japan directly, so the creator gets all the money, there’s no middle man and I get exactly what I want.

    Exchange rates aren’t in our favor, either. But even when they were Hen Da Ne would sell an average doujinshi for $20-$25. It covers the costs and makes it possible for them to pay their employees.

  3. DezoPenguin says:

    I found the “Off the Shelf” column an interesting read, but one thing caught my eye, which was the discussion of “male gaze” in GirlFriends. Being a male myself, I tend to completely miss that kind of thing unless it’s ridiculously over the top like Queen’s Blade since I’m, well, looking out of a male gaze all the time. What I’m wondering is, did you, Erica, or anyone else notice any significant difference in such things between GirlFriends (running as the column noted in a seinen magazine) and Kisses, Sighs, and Cherry-Blossom Pink, particularly the Yuri Hime chapters. (Or, for that matter, any difference between Nana & Hitomi’s Yuri Hime and Comic High chapters…)

    In other words, I’m wondering if there’s some discernible difference between Milk Morinaga’s artwork for a magazine marketed at girls (…back then, at least) and one marketed at men.

  4. @DezoPenguin – Good question, and the answer is, “Yes, most definitely.” Here is my review of Volume 1: http://okazu.blogspot.com/2008/02/Yuri-manga-girl-friends-volume-1.html in which I point out the service, and the male gaze, as well.

  5. DezoPenguin says:

    Thanks, Erica! *reads* So there’s a slight uptick in the service level due to Sugi’s top-doffing antics but mostly it’s the same kind of service that’s featured in actually-targeted-at-girls shoujo manga (as opposed to how in Record of Lodoss War every time Pirotess entered a scene the camera started fixed on her breasts and panned away from there, which is what I usually think of when I see the phrase “male gaze”).

  6. I think it’s not all that different, honestly. RpLW is by a guy for a male audience and drawn back in the say when characters were adults. This series pretends to be a primer to girls by a woman for a male audience with a fixation on school girls. Is it really less creepy to you to obsess about high school girls taking off their clothes than it is to look at an adult female’s breasts? ^_^

  7. Anonymous says:

    “Any kind of import/export sales is expensive, because you have to pay the cost of the item, shipping to the reseller, the cost of processing and shipping to you, the cost of the time and effort of the reseller and a profit so it is worth their time.”

    *Especially* if you have to pay the *retail* cost of the item! Some other imports I’ve seen are inexpensive, but I think my local supermarket’s chain buys those crops wholesale (and the size of the food market compared to the size of the Japanese comics market gives a whole new meaning to buying in BULK).

    BTW, since the ethics and lack thereof of pirating media came up in another comments thread, I just realized: what about blog posts written for parent audiences about kids and media? Ever thought about commenting over on places like http://life-with-aspergers.blogspot.com/2012/05/drawing-line-on-media-access-for-your.html to remind parents to buy manga (because really, who do kids get their money from?) instead of letting their kids download it illegally for free?

  8. @Anonymous – No, it has never once occurred to me to go find a forum about a topic I have no experience with and post there. ^_^

    There are a million places on the internet, and I can’t (and won’t) seek all of them out. If you know of a post I’ve written that’s relevant to the folks at that forum, feel free to post a link.

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