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Del Rey Manga is the manga-publishing imprint of Del Rey Books, a branch of Ballantine Books, in turn a branch of Random House. For those of you not familiar with their work, they bring us successful manga such as Negima, Basilisk, Tsubasa, XXXholic and one of my all-time top faves, Parasyte. I appreciate that although they have some turkeys in their lineup they try to maintain a decent blah to blockbuster ratio. Lookin' at you, Tokyopop.

 

Looking over the new solicitations for March 2008, I was made to pause when I came to Del Rey's offerings. While normally I get queasy when it comes to anthologies– too hit-or-miss– the forthcoming Faust anthology magazine sounds pretty compelling. Originally published by Kodansha, it will feature a mix of short stories, articles, comics and illustrations inspired by manga, anime and video games. Since its debut in 2003, six volumes of Faust have been published in Japan, Taiwan and Korea. The first issue will feature stories and illustrations by some popular manga-ka, including Yun Kouga (Loveless), Hajime Ueda (Q-Ko-Chan), CLAMP (Tsubasa, xxxHolic), and– wait for it– Takeshi Obata, revered illustrator of the bestselling title Death Note. From all accounts, the series is expected to be very cutting-edge, both in terms of literary content and illlustration. Honestly I'm intrigued by the mash-up direction this seems to be taking.

 

The anthology will still have the smaller dimensions of a manga, which I think is too bad. I understand that if it's already formatted that way there's not much else you can do, but I'd love to see it oversized like a true magazine. Titles like KERA, Gothic & Lolita, Hobby Japan and other Japanese-language special interest magazines do just fine when they find their niche at Star Clipper, so I can only imagine that the English-language version of Faust will do well. I think we'd all like to see more in this vein. For that matter I'd like to see some of the Japanese tabloids either be collected in a "Greatest Hits" edition in English or simply become available on a serialized basis. I love a good trashy read in any language! Uh, pictures, please.

 

-AJ 

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