Sailor Moon manga revival?

ANN has a pictorial of the master Range Murata at work, whipping up a portrait on a Wacom Cintiq in under an hour in front of an admiring audience in Taiwan.

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CBR profiles Torajiro Kishi’s Devil, a manga made specifically for Dark Horse that is infused with “Western” comic visuals.

Manga readers should already be familiar with Kishi.  His adult manga Maka Maka was released in the US by Media Blasters.

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The Torontoist speaks with Christopher Butcher about the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, his fascination with Japanese manga as an industry, and all the blogging he does.

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Yaoi Press elaborates on the publisher’s failed attempt to make one of its books available on iTune Apps.  The publisher went to great lengths to remove any potentially objectionable content, but the book was rejected without comment.  In absence of an explanation, we can only assume that Apple, or a lone App reviewer at Apple, has an issue with the theme…

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Should newspaper companies subsidize laptop and tablets/pads?  There are two problems this plan might not address… 1) People don’t want to pay for news anymore, period.  So unless paywalls are erected industry-wide, across all platforms (i.e. websites, news aggregators, Yahoo, Google, etc), subscriptions won’t work.  2) A lot of the pain papers are feeling now comes from falling ad revenue from both print and web.  What is different about distribution through iPad, that would convince advertisers to pay more than they do on websites?

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Ooh, the manga Aki Sora by Masahiro Itosugi will be getting its own OVA series.  Itosugi sensei is the author of our own Wish of My Sister.  So congratulations to her.

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Spotted via ICv2… Global License reports that efforts are underway at Toei Animation to “revive” the Sailor Moon anime.  The relaunch will be international, with Italy being the first country to receive a broadcast.

Original creator Naoko Takeuchi is said to be involved, which raises the question of how the manga fits into the brand revival plans.  Sailor Moon was long out of print until only a year ago, when Kodansha was given permission for a re-issue (Takeuchi had a falling out with Kodansha after the publisher lost some manuscript pages of another manga she had been working on). If there is to be an international revival of the manga, one obvious candidate for a US publisher would be Kodansha USA.  In fact, Sailor Moon came up often during the rumor phase of the company.  If Kodansha wants to ingratiate itself to the most hardcore of manga fandom, this would be its biggest opportunity.  Yet, even after making its official debut with 2 books, Kodansha and its immediate publishing schedule, if it even has one, are still very much shrouded in mystery.  So this may not be a safe bet.

Kodansha practically severed all ties with Tokyopop, the original US licensee of Sailor Moon, so we can cross them off the list.  Might Del Rey be interested in Sailor Moon?

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Have you ever wanted to sound like an authentic Osakan?  Or learn how to say STFU like a proper lady from the upper echelon of society?  Then this is the site for you.

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Hey, you notice something?  Range Murata, Torajiro Kishi, Masahiro Itosugi, and Hiroki Otsuka (from last post)…  all of them have, at one point or another, drawn porn manga (Murata’s contributions being mostly confined to doujinshi and art books).  Now they all enjoy some level of mainstream success.

Would they be where they are now, had they not been allowed to draw ero?  Is ero not a point along each one of their artistic paths?