The official site for the Death Note Live action movies has been updated. There's a simple Flash animation on there now with some entries in the Death Note. My Kanji reading is admittedly...bad, so I won't offer any attempts at translation here. Production of the films seems to be on schedule. There is an entry in the introduction section dated Feb. 27th though. You can view the site at www.death-note-movie.com

I think X: The TV Series is yet another little-known Anime gem. It's chock full of great stuff: tragic heroes, deeply developed characters, and totally kick-ass fight scenes. What more could you ask for?

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Calendarlive.com, a division of the LA Times, recently had an article about fanfiction or "non-canonical" stories that expand the Sherlock Holmes stories. In this article, the author references similarities with doujinshi and Yaoi. I never really thought that Sherlock Holmes and yaoi would be referenced in one article.

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My little post about Kappa Mikey stirred up quite a bit of controversy...good! The NY times has an article that provides a more favorable review of the show, but it brings up the same points I mentioned. The burning question remains: is this really Anime?

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MangaNews reports that Finnish manga import site Bemmu.com is offering free copies of manga to known scanlator groups. This seems to be an extremely odd move for an import site to support groups that potentially take money out of their pockets, but then again those Scandinavians do think differently than everyone else.

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The vast majority of anime fans have picked up some of the Japanese language. Many of the more hardcore fans take fandom to the next level (as they often do) and take formal Japanese language lessons. The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) recently had an article on their site talking about middle school kids learning Japanese to better enjoy their Anime and Mange. It seems the Otaku are getting younger by the day.

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Do you think that creating manga would be all cake and ice cream? Well, think again. Kiriko Kubo recently spoke at the Manga Manufacturing exhibition in London. She's responsible for such manga as Imadoki no Kodomo. At the exhibition Kubo gives details about her job, likening it to being a factory worker of all things.

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The New York Times has an article about how book publishers are turning to manga to possibly boost sales. Tokyopop is featured prominently in the piece, which I'm sure they're very happy about.

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