New York Comic Con

CMX Manga

CMX editor James Chadwick and director of manga Asako Suzuki were the company's speakers for their Saturday afternoon panel. Chadwick started the panel with a look at Batman: Death Mask, a four-issue American comic drawn by Yoshinori Natsume and co-published under both the CMX and DC logos. Later in the year, CMX will be collecting them into a single manga-style volume. They then quickly ran through close to two dozen manga that CMX will be bringing out in the coming months, some of which have never been mentioned before.

The main storyline of Emma, one of their most well-known titles, is finished, with the seventh volume having come out at the end of March. However, one more volume of side stories set in the same universe will be published next year, while Shirley, another short-story collection is scheduled for July 2. Other books listed for spring and summer include the mature-rated, 2-volume Dorothea (shipping on April 30); Two Flowers of the Dragon, from the author of CMX's The Recipe for Gertrude (May 5); The Flat Earth Exchange (June 25); and A Girl Who Runs Through Time. Despite the similar-sounding title, this is not directly related to Bandai Entertainment's The Girl Who Leapt Through Time movie, but rather, is an adaptation of the original 1965-66 novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui that the movie is actually a sequel to. New volumes of Gon, Dokkoida?! and Teru Teru x Shonen will also be published between May and June, and Go West!, set, predictably enough, in a Wild West parody, and created by Dokkoida?!'s Yu Yagami, is on the calendar for November.

Last year, CMX announced that it had invested in a new Japanese manga publishing company, called Flex Comix. Now, the first books that have been produced with funds from this investment are set to make their way back to the U.S. The five-volume Kiichi and the Magic Books is a supernatural adventure series about a young boy who is chased out of his home village after his mother dies for looking like a demon. He meets a traveling “library man”, who goes from village to village lending out books, and embarks on a quest to learn his own origins and work out a place in the world. Another is Classical Medley, an adventure manga by Sanae Kana that draws on musical terms for the names of its characters. A decidedly different new acquisition is Astral Project, with story by marginal, a pen name of Old Boy writer Garon Tsuchiya. The artist is Syuji Takeya, and this four-volume manga is the story of a teenager who has an outer body experience after listening to a CD he finds in his sister's room soon after her death.

More new acquisitions include the science fiction/comedy Suihelibe! (mild-mannered biology student meets alien girl); Fire Investigator Nanase, which may be the second-ever firefighting-based manga released in English; the music-student relationship drama Venus Capriccio; and Jihai, from Flat Earth Exchange's Toshimi Nigoshi.

Finally, CMX has the rights to the manga version of Ballad of a Shinigami, the light novel of which is currently out from Seven Seas Entertainment.