Viz Manga News

Viz will be releasing a number of graphic novel collections this January. Marionette Generation volume 1 will be released January 12th, for $15.95 at 192 pages. The relationship comedy is from the character designer of Macross, Haruhiko Mikimoto. The latest volume Rumiko Takahashi’s Inu-Yasha, volume 8, will be released January 19th for $15.95 at 184 pages. The third volume of Dragon Ball Z will be released January 15th for $14.95 at 192 pages.

In a very interesting development, domestic comic writer Warren Ellis, Marvel X-Book’s “plotmaster,” and creator of excellent comic works Transmetropolitan, The Authority, and Plaentary, will be writing a column for the manga anthology Pulp, starting in volume 5 #1. In his new monthly column, the critically acclaimed English-language comics writer discusses how American and Japanese culture interact through comics. “Western comics were not the same after Akira,” Ellis says. “It was most Western people’s first exposure to post-Tezuka, massively decompressed storytelling. And it was strange to see a Japanese comic, coming as it did from a place that still labored under lots of stereotyping and misconception from abroad, Showing ‘us’ how to make a comic so utterly contemporaneous.”