Manga Recon at NY Comic-Con: Day Two

Today’s front-line report comes from the Go! Comi trenches, where The Little Manga Publisher That Could announced plans to take over the world. And publish some new books. Creative Director Audry Taylor unveiled four new licenses:

• Hikkatsu, a sci-fi series that pits a teenage boy against monstrous household appliances in–where else?–a post-apocalyptic world overrun by killer toasters and refrigerators;
• Kanna, a shonen series about a cute little girl who’s pursued across space and time by monsters bent on her destruction;
• King of the Lamp, a shojo title from the creator of Tenshi Ja Nai!. The protagonist is a player whose Rico Suave antics infuriate the wrong woman. He finds himself sealed inside a lamp with only one ticket to freedom: help 1,000 lonely women find relationship bliss; and
• Lovemaster A, a series with a classic shojo set-up: young girl transfers to new school, can’t get a date, and decides to transform the student council from a staid group of hall monitors and bake-sale organizers to a full-fledged dating service. Sounds more profitable than selling M&Ms and wrapping paper.

Go! Comi also shared some artwork from the recently-announced Black Sun Silver Moon, eliciting wild catcalls of glee from fans of bishies and zombies. For cover art and additional scoop on these new acquisitions, visit MangaCast. (A podcast will be available shortly.)

The bigger news: Wendy Pini is creating a new series for Go! Comi. Taking its inspiration from Edgar Allen Poe’s short mood piece “The Masque of the Red Death,” Pini’s new series is a dark, mature story with yaoi overtones–definitely not the cute, family-friendly fare found in a typical issue of ElfQuest. The three-volume series will debut online, in color, in a few months (no specifics were given at the panel discussion), with three new pages of content posted on the Go! Comi site each week. These pages will then be bound into 160-page volumes; expect the first on store shelves in 2008.

Other tidbits from the Go! Comi panel:

• Her Majesty’s Dog, their first and only six-month exclusive with Borders, is their best selling title. Six of eleven volumes have been published so far. (Volume six arrives at Borders in March and other fine retail establishments in September.) When asked to describe the series, Taylor called it “InuYasha–with an ending.” Touche!
• Go! Comi is exploring the possibility of posting more webcomics on their site. Details were fuzzy, but it sounded like a potential outlet for publishing what Taylor called “manga-ai” (”manga-influenced”) works by American artists, as well as a place to post chapters of ongoing licensed titles.
• Look for another big, earth-shattering Go! Comi announcement at AnimeEXPO this spring.

IN OTHER NEWS…
CMX is distributing a sampler of 11 new series. Many of these titles–Go Go Heaven!, Canon, Time Guardian, Apothecarius Argentum–have been listed on amazon and CMX’s own website for several months, and will be reaching stores this spring. The sampler does feature some less-publicized summer and fall releases–Venus in Love, King of Cards, I Hate You More Than Anyone, The Palette of 12 Secret Colors–as well as two series slated for publication in 2008: Tears of the Lamb and Two Flowers for the Dragon. The best news? Beginning in July 2007, CMX will be reissuing Masashi Tanaka’s classic series Gon. If you’re not already familiar with his gorgeous, wordless story about a plucky little dinosaur, you’re in for a treat.

Next up: The scoop on Del Rey and Vertical, Inc., as well as notes from Tokyopop’s Artist and Author Round Table