Tagged: Manga

UDON Entertainment, the Canadian-based creative studio, has announced a Manga for Kids Website setting the stage for the April release of Tomomi Mizuna’s The Big Adventures of Majoko and Shunshin Maeda’s Ninja Baseball Kyuma.

ICv2 reports these are the first two volumes announced for the new line, to be followed in May by Mera Hakamada’s Fairy Idol Kanon followed by the first volume of Lun Lun Yamamoto’s Swans in Space in June. 

UDON intends to promote its new juvenile Manga line at conferences for the American Library Association, the American Association of School Libraries, and the International Reading Association. 

The four titles are coming to North America from publisher Poplar, a leading kodomo (kids’ manga) publisher.

The Big Adventures of Majoko (Itazura Majoko no Daibouken) is a five-volume series that debuted in 2004 while Ninja Baseball Kyuma (Kyuuma!) is just a three-volume sports manga that also premiered in 2004 as did the four-volume fantasy Manga Fairy Idol Kanon.  The three-volume Swans in Space (Uchuu no Hakuchou) debuted in 2006.

This week: three books with very little in common. Oh, they’re all recently published – on paper, and in English, even! – but that’s about it. So you won’t be bothered by my heavy-handed attempts to link everything together this time….

B.Ichi, Vol. 1
By Atsushi Ohkubo
Yen Press, October 2008, $10.99

In the nation of Japon, in the city of Toykyo, in the busy Chinjuku section – are your ribs sore from all of the nudging yet? mine were – an impressionable and unworldly young man named Shotaro is looking for his good deed of the day. You see, in this alternate world – you did get that it’s an alternate world, didn’t you? Because the alternative is that the translator was just really, really bad at spelling – there are “dokeshi,” who use more of their brains than the rest of us, to unleash superpowers, but they also each have a condition that governs those powers.

(OK, just for the record. The “people only use 10% of their brains” idea? Bunk. Utter bunk. It’s not true now, and it never was true – it was misreporting from an era when scientists studying the brain only knew what 10% of it did. But, even then, they knew it was all being used for something – they’d just only figured out part of it. But some people are so gullible they’d drown if they looked up during a rainstorm…)

Anyway, back to Shotaro. His power is that he gets the abilities of animals by chewing on their bones. (In the ever-lovin’ Animal Man vein, as if birds needed “superpowers” to fly, rather than wings, light bones, and strong muscles.) His condition is that he has to do a good deed a day. And his disposition is that intense sunnyness seen only in manga protagonists who have no clue about the actual rules of their world.

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