Two quick things of note:
I will be doing a book signing of 100% Yuri from ALC Publishing on Wednesday January 16th at 6:30 PM at Jim Hanley’s Universe in Manhattan, as part of a Prism Comics night. I’ll be joined by authors JD Glass and Abby Denson.
JHU is located at 4 West 33rd St. on 5th Avenue, just across from the Empire State Building.
If you are in the NYC area or can get there for the event, I’d love to see you there!
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Ichijinsha has announced that Comic Yuri Hime is being made an independent entity from Ichijinsha’s popular comic magazine Zero Sum. Akiba blog reports that to celebrate, the 11th volume, on sale on Jan. 18th, will include the Petit Yuri Hime extra, which is a collaboration of artists from Yuri Hime, Yuri Hime S and Yuri Hime: Wildrose. (If you read the announcement on Comipress, they misreported YH as an add-on to Zero Sum – it wasn’t. It was financially dependent upon it and now it’s paying for itself. Also, since this isn’t their area, they didn’t realize that the “Petit” extra was the collaborative effort. FYI, in case you were going to write in ask why the discrepancies.)
This is excellent news, but I can’t help still being worried about the salaciousness of the magazine. More and more of the stories are moe/loli and the “Petit” extra has traditionally been pretty high on the service scale, based on the authors. (The first two volumes were offered as Comiket extras. I do not have either, but have seen Vol. 2.) I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt and offer my congratulations to Ichijinsha for making “Yuri” a profitable category!
I remember you mentioning those worries about the “moefication” in your review for vol 9 (I think) but I didn’t think much of it at the time. However, I just went and compared vol 3 with vol 10 and I have to absolutely agree with you.
Unfortunately, I think it’s just a reflection of the anime/manga climate at the moment, because moe is creeping into pretty much everything. I don’t have a problem with it per se, but I would like to see some normally proportioned, strong, adult women once in a while, so I can only hope that the industry will move on to the next cash cow fairly soon.
Having said that, it’s still great news that Yuri Hime can now support itself financially (what would I do without Strawberry Shake Sweet and Hatsukoi Shimai!?), and even if it is becoming more moe, it is still clearly marketed more towards LFGs than LFBs.
I keep hoping that fandumb will start getting sick of cute fetuses and go back to stacked femme fatales. :-)
“(what would I do without Strawberry Shake Sweet and Hatsukoi Shimai!?), and even if it is becoming more moe, it is still clearly marketed more towards LFGs than LFBs.”
You are absolutely correct. The publisher already said in an interview(a very long time ago though) that the ‘Yuri Hime’ main is largely for females. And anyhow Comic zero sum is a primarily shoujo mag.
I’m just kinda tired of the LFBs insisting that the Yuri genre should exclude female fans whenever possible.