Cheerful Eros Project actually ships! | Animate handling Libre manga on Kindle

First copies came in on Monday.  It looks beautiful. Boxes were all wrapped in green tape emblazoned with the words “US Customs and Border Protection.”  As if the UPS delivery man didn’t think I was weird enough already.

Yes, now is the time to bug your local comic shop or online retailer about getting a copy.

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Many thanks to JRB for spotting this… Delivery Cupid from Libre Publishing is now available for the Amazon Kindle, apparently through Animate/MOVIC, a company with various interests in anime production, merchandising, and retailing.  Animate has an English page set up, and while bare-bones at the moment, it reveals three more titles in addition to Delivery Cupid that it will be publishing on Kindle in April:

You Asagiri “Golden Cain”
Haruka Minami “Love a La Carte!”
Nase Yamato “Pet on Duty”

Golden Cain and Love a la Carte were previously licensed to CPM’s Be Beautiful imprint, while Pet On Duty and Delivery Cupid were licensed to Broccoli/Boysenberry (I do believe I see a pattern here.)  Animate vows to publish 4 new titles per month.

As for the question raised by the Yaoi Press blog about the similarities between the cover of the Kindle edition of Delivery Cupid with the Broccoli print version, there is now a possible explanation… it is the Broccoli cover.  Animate is a major stakeholder of Broccoli, and the two have a joint venture called AniBro.  In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the staff at Animate USA are Broccoli Books alumni.

BTW, the book looks great.  Aside from the compression on the images (necessary because Amazon imposes a file size limit), Cupid is very readable on both Kindle and PC, with well-sized font (although slightly bold… a common result of conversion to 4-bit greyscale) and hardly any moire.  The book does not give credit to the translator and localization team, however, which I thought was kind of disappointing.

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Matt Thorn speaks with Publishers Weekly about the Fantagraphics manga lineup, takes a few shots at the competition for their translation quality (you’d have known his feelings on the subject already if you followed his blog), and hints at the possibility of original manga for Fanta.

Also at PW, Yen and Tokyopop talk about making successful prose-to-comic adaptations.

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Anime Vice notes that the language of a newly-enacted law in Great Britain could potentially outlaw a significant number of anime and manga, whether explicit or not.  I believe this is the same piece of legislation that was debated since early 2009.

I was just watching the man-faced peach tree episode of Inu Yasha on VizAnime, and it showed Kagome’s behind and cleavage.  How old is she, 15, 16 years old? Better cross England off my vacation list, lest they have a warrant on me.

Edit: Here’s The Register’s take on this.  (Spotted via ANN)