Manga have become so popular in Japan and throughout the world, that an increasing number of young people aspire to become mangaka, or manga artists. As its title suggests, Hirohiko Araki’s Manga in Theory and Practice is a how-to guide, designed to help young artists find their way. Araki says, “I want this book to […]

Anime Expo (AX) has become North America’s largest anime convention, with 115,726 attendees jamming the Los Angeles Convention Center and J.W. Marriott this year. For the first time, AX live-streamed thirty hours of programming to over 360,000 views from 67 countries. A perfect venue for a studio to promote their work. Toei Animation, Inc. displayed […]

Poor Tatara Fujita. He’s a junior high kid with no idea what he wants to do with his life. He’s smitten by Shizuku Hanaoka, a smart and attractive girl in his class but he’s too shy to approach her. He has no job and he’s flat broke. What’s the solution to his problem? Ballroom dancing. […]

A master thief. A hit man. A Samurai warrior. A femme fatale. Add a Japanese detective as tenacious as Wile E. Coyote. Mix them all together with clever plots, over-the-top action, slapstick humor and snazzy theme music, and you have the ingredients for Lupin the 3rd, a formula that has generated a 14-volume manga series, […]

The rollicking comedy-adventure Outlaw Star began as manga by Takehiko Ito and the artists at Morningstar Studios, who also made the animated series. In the distant future, interstellar space is divided between Pirates and the Space Forces. The self-proclaimed Outlaws scratch out a living in the odd spaces unoccupied by the two powers. Like a […]

Based on the manga by Yuji Iwahara, Dimension W is an oddly uneven series, alternately intriguing and muddled. The story takes place in 2036, after the discovery of a fourth Euclidean dimension solved all of Earth’s energy problems. Power flows from this little understood dimension through a series of huge stations to individual battery-receivers called […]