As May draws to a close…
My stack of review copies is starting to get a little precarious, so while I’m in between rewrites I’ll have to put a dent in it. It’ll be nice to sit down and read for a while; I haven’t been reading much of anything lately, having just been on vacation for a week and a half (and being stuck in an interesting-but-slow nonfiction book).
OTOH, I met my monthly quota of geek! time by spending the past weekend at Anime North in Toronto. AN is a large con, with over 15,000 attendees this year, and it’s very fan-driven. This year’s pleasant discovery was that we had some (last minute?) industry presence: Lance Heiskell from FUNimation was in attendance, which was fun. I didn’t get to see all of his panels, but he seemed very accessible and entertained a lot of questions, although he couldn’t address several subjects which were being covered the next day at Anime Boston. Good stuff, though, and AFAIK he was the first major industry rep. to come up since ADV made a one-time appearance a few years ago. I hope we get a repeat performance next year!
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Five MangaLife reviews to wrap up May:
Dogs Prelude (vol. 0) (A-)
High School Debut vol. 9 (A)
Kaze Hikaru vol. 13 (B+)
NANA vol. 15-16 (A+)
Rosario + Vampire vol. 7 (B-)
New releases and unrelated review links
Two of my rewrites are out or coming out this month: Sgt. Frog vol. 17 and Animal Academy: Hakobune Hakusho vol. 1. The Frog is the Frog; if you’ve read it, you know what it’s like. This volume had a few particularly difficult adaptation challenges (the puns often don’t translate well), but I think it came through okay. ^_^
Animal Academy is just starting out, and it’s adorable. I’ve only read two volumes, so I don’t really know where it’s heading; there’ve been a few hints in those volumes that things might not be as fluffy as they seem from the premise, but since I haven’t read anything else by the author I don’t know yet how far those things might be taken. In the meantime, it’s cute and endearing, and there’s nothing wrong with that. (I haven’t seen a hard copy yet, but the reviews I’ve seen suggest it’s being marketed for younger readers.)
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I’ve had three new reviews go up at MangaLife in the last few weeks (which isn’t as many as usual, but things have been a little insane lately).
Beauty Pop vol. 9-10 (B)
B.O.D.Y. vol. 5 (C)
Love*Com vol. 12 (B+)
