Oh, readers, it’s been fairly chaotic behind the scenes at Manga Bookshelf lately, and we’ve fallen behind in so many ways. In the interest of catching up ever so slightly, here are a few links that have piled up over the past few weeks:
To my great delight, ANN recently reported that Kazuya Minekura’s action-packed BL epic Wild Adapter, which has been rerunning from the beginning in Ichijinsha’s Monthly Comic Zero-Sum since sometime last year will be resuming fresh serialization next spring, now that Minekura’s health is back on track. This is particularly big news here at Manga Bookshelf, where some of us (as you may recall) are very big fans.
Moving on from BL to Yuri, JManga is going all out for its new series YuruYuri. From their press release:
In celebration of the release, JManga has released a special “YuruYuri” feature including a character introduction and relationship chart, famous scenes, as well as a special article on Yuri manga by Erica Freidman (Yuricon, ALC Publishing). Additionally, JManga is holding a special quiz contest for YuruYuri fans from August 23rd to 29th (PST). Fans simply need to take the 4 question quiz, and get all the answer right, to be automatically entered into a special drawing for YuruYuri merchandise straight from Japan!
Don’t miss that contest!
At CNN’s “Geek Out!” blog, Danica Davidson discusses why female readers are drawn to manga (spoiler: FEMALE CREATORS), including quotes from people like VIZ’s VP of Publishing, Leyla Aker, and super-librarian Robin Brenner. Definitely a must-read!
Lastly, a quick poll! A while back I’d talked to my fellow Manga Bookshelf bloggers about the possibility of opening up a discussion forum on the site. At the time, everyone agreed that limiting discussion to comment threads on our individual posts helped keep things focused and easy to manage, so I shelved the idea. Just recently, however, I’ve had a request from a reader that we open up a forum here, so I thought I’d bring it to the rest of you for discussion as well. Please note that in any scenario, we would be leaving our posts’ comment threads exactly as-is, rather than moving comments into the forum space, so the forum would exist as a separate entity for discussion.
[poll id=”4″]
My current ideas for what might happen in the forums include: reader reviews (best get promoted to the MB main page), demographic/genre-specific threads, tips for buying manga on the cheap, featured weekly topics, sharing your picspam, ‘shipper’s forums, fanfic recs, and more!
Note: Any discussion forum at Manga Bookshelf would be both fandom-friendly and highly moderated. We are, as always, dedicated to creating a safe space for all.
Please feel free to elaborate or share suggestions in comments! And please vote!
Dan says
August 25, 2012 at 12:30 amI’ve never really been active on discussion forums before, but if I was going to start this is definitely the crowd I would want to be chatting with.
Geri-chan says
August 25, 2012 at 3:43 amI checked “maybe” because I’m not sure how active I’d be on the forum, but I’d like to join in the discussion from time to time when a topic that interests me comes up. I’d definitely be interested in some BL discussion, and I like the idea of shippers’ forums and fanfic recs.
ZepysGirl says
August 26, 2012 at 12:34 amI would love a forum! It probably wouldn’t be the busiest of places, but I’m sure it’d be worthwhile. Count me in for shipping discussions and fanfic recs! Fanfic recs would be very much appreciated, as manga-fanfic seems to be a little hard to find (ESPECIALLY when there’s no anime). And I already sorta-host a thread on manga sales over at ANN; I would totally be cool with hosting a similar thread over here. (When I see a good sale, I just want to sing it from the rooftops, essentially. XD)
CJ says
August 26, 2012 at 3:47 pmI would love a forum as well, it might not start off to busy, but hopefully it will get there over time, right? But yeah, I’ve always found it difficult to find a busy manga forum, the manga sub-forums on other sites just…aren’t as busy as anything anime on the same sites, but coming from a manga specific site, hopefully it would change that.
tungwene says
August 29, 2012 at 1:09 pmAm I too late to participate in the poll and did it close already, or is it broken?
I would’ve voted maybe in the poll to a forum. I keep wanting to interact more with the creators and the readers on this site but I’m usually too busy to remain caught up with reading everything and, as evidenced by my tardiness here, by the time I get around to reading things the discussion has usually died or moved on. Can’t make any promises I’d be a regular poster but I’m much better with keeping up with bite sized forum posts than full articles especially if the forum were Tapatalk enabled http://www.tapatalk.com/
Linda says
September 4, 2012 at 11:47 amI voted Maybe… but seems as if I was too late to vote… still I kinda wouldn’t mind lurking in and out.. so good luck on implmentation or not. ^_^