Good News and No News From Sakura-Con
“VINLAND SAGA” LIVES AGAIN!!!
Kodansha USA announced last week that volumes six and seven of this excellent series will be released this September and December, respectively. Even though I was having a good time at WonderCon when I read this news, finding out about “Vinland Saga’s” eventual return to print was the highlight of my day. However, this news came with a catch. It turns out that Kodansha’s license for the series only extends to these coming volumes. So if we want to see what happens after the fourteenth Japanese volume (remember, our editions have been 2-in-1 omnibi so far) then we’ll actually have to buy them.
Though the fact that this title’s U.S. fate is still uncertain is just a little nerve-wracking for me, I think that Kodansha is handling things in the right way here. Certainly better than what I’ve seen from whenever Dark Horse brings one of their manga series out of hiatus over the years. In fact, I think that this “temporary suspension of publishing” for the series may have been part of the plan all along. Regardless of whether or not Kodansha had the rights to publish all of these volumes at first, or if they had to re-negotiate after releasing vol. 5, sales were bad enough that they had to put things on hold for a while. This gets the fans of the series anxious and aggravated as they wait for news of what’s going to happen for the remaining volumes. Then Kodansha announces that more volumes are coming, but the release of future ones will hinge on sales. Now fans have a reason (and around five months) to spread the word and get everyone they know to buy these upcoming volumes so we can get the rest.
On that note: If you haven’t been reading “Vinland Saga” then now is the best time to start. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by what you find.
While this is good news, it was the absence of any new announcements from Dark Horse out of this convention that I found almost as interesting. Most of the new manga announcements from the publisher have come out of Sakura-Con over the years. I was expecting more from this weekend, but the publisher didn’t even have a panel at the con. Apparently the announcement that they were license-rescuing “Planetes” was made in the absence of such.
I am tempted to read into this as further evidence of the diminishing presence of Dark Horse in the manga market, but it’s just a bit too soon for that. This isn’t even the first time they’ve stopped attending an anime convention in years past. I still miss Carl Horn’s presence at Fanime: If it weren’t for all those panels I attended with him as a moderator, it’s unlikely you’d be seeing his name mentioned as much on this blog. The real sign of the times will come when Anime Expo rolls around in July. If they don’t have anything to announce then…
Hell. I don’t want to be right about predicting their future to be one of managing their backlist, license-rescues, anime tie-ins of dubious quality, and scrounging for new titles from the creators they’ve already published. (That last one may not be much of a future here since Kodansha will be publishing new titles from Hiroaki Samura and Hiroya Oku later this year.) The thing is, Dark Horse still needs to put up some evidence that I’m wrong about all this. Will we get that evidence at AX in July? I certainly hope so.