Blue Eyes 3, Pet Humiliation Diary shipping; catching up on last week

In a pathetic attempt to appear cool to the hip young technocrats, I have uploaded a few book previews in bittorrent format.  All of them are at least 16 pages and uncensored.  You can help us out by seeding the files, and mentioning these torrents at, you know, wherever you guys usually go to pirate these things.  This experiment will last until our ISP drops us for bandwidth abuse.  Thanks!

• Anzu: The Shards of Memory
• Blue Eyes volume 3
• Council of Carnallity Unlimited
• Kaerimichi: The Road Home
• Masquerade
• Pet Humiliation Diary
• The Spirit of Capitalism
• Taboo District

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…and our printer has informed me that both Blue Eyes 3 and Pet Humiliation Diary have shipped.  Whee!

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Besides missing supposedly the most shocking fight in UFC’s WW division since Penn choked out Hughes even though it was within driving distance, I also missed out on the following items of interest…

Via MangaNews, more information on the international manga competition currently being held by Kodansha.  Submission are to be between 12 to 50 pages.  The prize for the first place finisher is $5,000… which is better than most advances for a full genre book nowadays.

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Noted columnist David Welsh has been appointed to the newly minted position of Manga Editor at online magazine Comic World News, which could mean…

1. CWN has secretly licensed some manga, or…
2. CWN will be expanding its manga coverage.  But either way, I’m almost 100% positive that…
3. David Welsh just got a huge raise, possibly tripling or even quadrupling in pay.

So congratulations!

Edit:  David Welsh confirms that the figure is much closer to decuple!

(This is how bad internet rumors start, isn’t it…)

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ComicsSnob’s Matt Blind looks at the evolution of the “otaku” (part I, part II, part III.)  Lots of great nuggets of info there, so I won’t butcher it and just point you all there.  But why is it that I remember Tetsuwan Atom in color…?

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ComiPress has a translation of this Japanese blog post which compares the price of manga magazines throughout the years on an average per-page basis.  Surprisingly, the price of each page of a manga magazine has not climbed since the mid 70s.  Had inflation been figured in, the graph would have showed that manga prices have actually been steadily declining.

There’s some very interesting analysis on the future of magazine publishing that should be helpful for all comics publishers… although a comic book being too heavy to lift is probably one we’d never need consider here, unfortunately.