The live action Death Note film L, change the WorLd, is now on DVD – and VIZ are celebrating by hosting a special event at the VIZ Cinema in San Francisco. VIZ PICTURES RELEASES LIVE-ACTION DEATH NOTE: L, change the WorLd Riveting Unwritten Concluding Chapter Of Edgy DEATH NOTE Psychological Crime Drama Available on DVD San Francisco, CA, July 31, [...]

This is Part Four of my ongoing quest to review manga that I would normally never, ever bother reading. This session’s genre: the sports manga. I’m not a sports person, really. I enjoy the occasional sumo match or baseball game (and, head hung with shame, I admit to enjoying Princess Nine). So sports manga rarely even register on my radar. [...]

Lucky for rabid Naoiki Urasawa fans (like me!), Viz is releasing all three movies of his 2oth Century Boys on DVD in the U.S.! Plus if you’re lucky and live in California you can even see it in theaters. ANN Article It was a given, I guess since Viz is currently releasing the manga as well (they’re up to volume [...]

I dug the animated Blood: The Last Vampire. Great animation, nice action, and Japanese schoolgirls with swords is always a plus. Never read the manga, so I can’t offer an opinion on that account. I did read Mamoru Oshii’s novelization, which was a lot better than it had any right to be. So how’s the movie? Again, haven’t seen it. [...]

It seems Vertical, Inc., a teensy-tiny publishing company that releases Japanese fiction and classic manga in the U.S., has no intention of closing up shop depsite the crisis that seems to be hitting the industry everywhere else. PW Article This is nice to know, since I really like their stuff, both content-wise and presentation-wise. They’ve been releasing a ton of [...]

I am really curious to see what emerges from the Stephen Spielberg / Will Smith adapation of Oldboy. Park Chan-Wook’s 2003 film was so remarkable, I have serious doubts that another adaptation can do anything with the source material that Chan-Wook didn’t already achieve. Plus – Spielberg? Smith? Incest? Not a likely combo. But I’ll stop bitching. Chan -Wook’s film [...]

Remember kids, Blood: The Last Vampire hits theaters July 10th!

I thought the original Blood: The Last Vampire was pretty underrated, and liked it enough to pick up Mamoru Oshii’s novel based on the same source material. I’ve not read the manga, but I am pretty curious about the upcoming live action adaptation. Here’s a new clip from the film, released today. The film hits screens on July 10th. Official [...]

This isn’t much of a post; this manga just sounds cool as Hell: Sweet! Panorama is an adaptation of a novella by Japanese detective fiction godfather, Edogawa Rampo. The story takes place at the end of the Taisho era, and follows an unsuccessful science fiction author with an uncanny resemblance to a former classmate/son of a rich industrialist family. When [...]

Aint It Cool News reports that a legal spat between Show East and Futubasha (publishers of the original Old Boy manga) is brewing over the currently-in-pre-production Hollywood re-make. Futabasha asserts that Show East violated, and nullified, their contract when they pushed for the production of a film remake with Universal Pictures. This lawsuit, filed on Monday, was revealed at the [...]

Wired posted a brief analysis of the obscenity charges brought against U.S. manga collector Christopher Handley, who was arrested for trafficking in ‘obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children’, aka smutty manga. AnaKhouri has blogged about this in the past, so I won’t gild the lily so-to-speak, but Wired’s piece is worth checking out. The case began in [...]

Ah, gender-switching. It seems to be an almost purely Japanese thing; off the top of my head, I can think of at least four manga or anime titles built around the idea, including the legendary Ranma ½, but no Western comics (and only a couple lame comedy movies from the 1980’s). It’s not a sub-genre that really interests me, and [...]

ComiPress (a manga news site) has published a long but interesting look at the battle between child porn laws and manga readers. Regular readers are probably tired of my harping on the subject, so I’ll just include this quote from the article that expresses my opinion perfectly: Given all the qualifying facts in the Whorley case, one might ask, why [...]

Some famous manga creators have lent their services to Japanese publisher Shueisha for a new series of the works of Jules Verne. I love Jules Verne, and I love manga…but what the fuck is up with the cover of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? It\’s the One on the Left I don’t remember any giant blue dude (Dr. Manhattan??) or [...]

Two notes on film: 1. Sony has acquired the rights to release the live-action adaptation of Blood: The Last Vampire into American theaters.  They even have an official website already! Check it out 2. Warner has picked up the rights to make a live-action version of Death Note. This apparently isn’t a remake of the Japanese live-action Death Note movies, [...]