Buying a house pretty much eats your life - and your online anime and manga presence

Wow.  Looking at the barren wasteland of this blog for the past year, one might think I had dropped out of fandom.  I haven't.  I was just searching for and buying a home.  Lest you think home-improvement has crowded out my love for manga and anime, my house has a library for all my manga and anime.  An entire room just for that.  And I may have recently bought something at Aldi's because it appeared in a CLAMP manga, and I sort of never expected it to show up in Aldi's. 

I may try to do some updating in the way that Connie over at Slightly Biased Manga did, where I look back through the year and pick some of my favorites and then make up award categories for them because it's fun and I want to have at least some record of what I thought was outstanding.  Then I may be moving to a monthly format for something I have been brewing for a while to review series that, for one reason or another, are unfinished.  If I can nail the idea and format down, I may even pitch it to the folks at Manga Bookshelf. 

And I may start forcing myself to take some more time to catch up on what's current in online fandom writing.  I can't catch up on what I missed, but I can at least try to get back into the game and figure out what writing styles are appealing to my target audience these days.  See you in a bit. : )

Requiem for Go!Comi

The death of this publisher was not nearly as unexpected or huge as CMX's, but it still made me sad.  If you were collecting any of these titles, you should really get a move on picking up the ones you're missing because something tells me they'll be even harder to find even faster. 

Complete Series I've enjoyed at least part of

• Afterschool Nightmare: This one deserved all the critical acclaim it received.  Solid series.
• Angel's Coffin: I like historical fiction and You Higuri.  So there.
• Black Sun, Silver Moon: I enjoyed it, not just for the zombie puppy. It was kind of sloppily plotted (and I don't say that because of all the undead/zombie killing), but there was some quality angst there.
• Bran Doll: Trashy, pointless, weird fun.
• Crossroad: Had some interesting issues dealt with in different ways than I'd seen before.  And the tone was kind of unique, too.
• Devil Within: Trashy, creepy, totally fell apart at the end, but still weirdly compelling.
• Her Majesty's Dog: Really liked this one, too, for its interesting interpersonal relationships and people behaving in unexpected ways nonetheless consistent with their deeper than usual characters.
• Night of the Beasts: Chika Shiomi knows how to not give you what you expect in your horror stories. 
• Tenshi Ja Nai!!: Kinda creepy sometimes, but I did enjoy the ride.

Probably Incomplete Series I've enjoyed at least part of

• 07-Ghost: Had such potential.
• Bogle: Fun caper-y brainlessness.
• Bound Beauty: Not nearly as creepy as it could have been; this one was actually a lot of fun.
• Cantarella: I AM SAD. How, aside from reading history books, will we ever find out what happened to Cesar?!  And moth-guy?  And the fictional characters?!?!
• Cross x Break: Okay, this one was just funny and mysterious from page 1.
• Crown: Stylish, silly, lots of fun.
• CY-Believers: Can't remember a thing about it, but I liked the first volume.
• Hikkatsu!: Come on.  He kills appliances.  Martial arts and appliances.  Best fighting move names ever.
• Kurogane Communication: Sweet, sad, wistful sort of post-apocalyptical story.
• Song of the Hanging Sky: Okay, I'll admit it: I thought Cantarella was the series I would be most disappointed about, but Song of the Hanging Sky is.  This series was just brilliant.  The art, the story, the characters, the world, the plot, the choices . . .  I may actually cry that I will never find out what happens to all these poor people.

Sigh.  I would like to hope that someone would pick some of the best of these up.  +anima didn't do that well, but there's this other manga about kids with wings that's doing pretty well for Yen Press.  Someone (Yen Press, Tokyopop) pick up Song of the Hanging Sky.  DMP might like 07 or Cantarella if it ever gets finished in Japan . . .

Thanks for the good times, Go!Comi.  Rest in Peace.

Any series you have fond memories of or will miss?

flare-up

I hope not to have to post this too much, but I've been having trouble with my tendonitis and an illness affecting my voice at the same time.  This renders me unable to type or write & dictate my posts.  That explains the absence of posts, I hope.  I'm working on it and hope to have more posts ready ahead of time for whenever it happens again.

Apologies.