Happy Birthday Manga Weekend!

Just as the post title says! Happy Birthday Manga Weekend! Strictly speaking it was yesterday since its already pass 12 am but it’s alright since the Americas is still on the 28th well…yeah. Anyway, we are now officially a year old! What initially was a dusty wardrobe for the first two months has now involved to be a pimped up room which we Manga Weekenders here love very much! Arawr and I are so very happy to have started this blog out even if Arawr was all “I don’t think we have time dude” on me about it at the beginning. Well, we still don’t have time, but we somehow we manage to keep the blog alive(barely)!

I really wanted to prepare a little something to commemorate the event but Arawr and I are still busy like a baws! In any case, THANK YOU to all who have stuck by us and welcome to our new visitors! With the current size and support we’re getting, we just might have our very own domain!

This is Chungky signing out.

Enjoy your weekend everyone!

Monthly Lala 10/2011~

Hello everyone. Greetings from the Host Club and I. I took a long time to prep up this post since I’m back and university and there’s just so much going on…missed our one-shot last week. The December issue of Lala will be out in a few days and I haven’t even got to scanning Lala 11 & Lala DX 11 yet. I’ve got Kuro(black) Lala with me as well so if anyone wants to have a round-up of that please leave a comment below!

I want to take this opportunity to THANK EVERYONE for supporting our first run of the Weekend Ani-Manga Mail!!! The feedback from you guys was AWESOME and I simply can’t thank you all enough! Thank you to Justin too for being our first participant. If your manga/anime list is going dry or you just want more(who doesn’t?), I hope you can give the Weekend Ani-Manga Mail a go! Please click here if you’re interested in participating or check back Manga Weekend to give your recommendations!

My scanner was giving me these weird things so I apologise in advance for any blunders. Let’s start with all the extras from this issue!

This Genius’s Manga To Highlight: Doujin Work

 Hello Manga Weekend readers–my name is Justin. I happen to be a writer/co-founder of Organization Anti-Social Geniuses, and I’m thankful that Chungky has allowed me to write about a manga series that I’m guessing 90% of the manga world does not know about–mainly because I would have never discovered it had I not wasted my time last year at AnimeNext’s Manga Library. Back then I was looking to consume all sorts of manga that had interesting title names (or find works of anime series–like Record of Lodoss War)–naturally, Doujin Work happened to be on the list. Doujin of course is widely known in Japan, and while there are a number of underground series that are tame, most Doujinshi mostly involve a guy “getting” the girl–or an alien “getting” a girl. Yeah, you should be getting the picture about Doujin now! So of course, I decided I would read it.

One-Shot for the Weekend – Haru Koi

Haru Koi (ハルコイ)

Manga-ka: Suetsugu Yuki

Genres: Drama, Josei, Slice-of-life, Romance

Introverted, 23-year-old Non-chan and enthusiastic, 50-year-old Ryouko-san have been good friends for a year ever since they met. When Non-chan falls in love, they both work together for her to gain the courage and approach her crush. But just what is the reason for Ryouko-san’s interest with Non-chan’s affairs?

The first chapter in Suetsugu Yuki’s tankōbon of one-shots, ‘Haru Koi’.

———

Okay my weekend started kinda crappy in a very angry and frustrated and DUDE WTF sort of way, so here’s a one-shot that has nothing to do with my life and hence might just banish those Saturday memories for the next 2 hours. Ugh.

So. Haru Koi. Same manga-ka as Chihayafuru, one of my top favourites (plus, the anime just came out this season so PLEASE check that out!) so this was definitely worth a read for me. It’s a josei manga instead of my usual shounen or seinen, but I do prefer it over shoujo most of the time. Anyway, whatever your own preference is – read this.

Haru Koi starts by taking the usual romance route of the girl falling in love, and there’s a nice sort of trickery to it. In the end, the focus of the relationship wasn’t the usual girl and guy-she-likes. Instead, the relationship focused exactly on what it was focusing on right from the start, which is the relationship between the two women. It was really a nice twist, since most stories just go down, girl confesses, girl goes out with guy, initial person who helped soon becomes a forgotten character.

There’s a lot of emotions that that sort of just swamps you towards the second half of the one-shot, but I guarantee you that this really is a beautiful story. It gave a more mature, more realistic sort of take on relationships that I really enjoyed. It’s as if it took a nice detour around the usual storyline, and it was a lovely walk down that lane.

…

Hmm. I already feel better XD

Rating: 4.5/5.0

Weekend’s Ani-Manga Mail – Help Justin discover new anime/manga!

Wey-hey! And here, Weekend’s Ani-Manga Mail takes off with our first participant, Justin from Organization Anti-Social Geniuses. Here are a few words from Justin:

My name is Justin, and I’m one of the writers at Organization Anti-Social Geniuses. I happen to live where the lights are brightest (allegedly), and where the 27-time World Series Champion Yankees play. Yes, that’s NY. I’m usually very quiet. I do like to laugh a lot.

—

Justin is looking for an anime/manga that either has a good story and/or something ridiculously hilarious. He would like the anime/manga to be very satisfying; whereby a story is built, ‘left with intentional plot holes, but either answered said plot holes or left them unanswered in a way where fans can debate for years in a positive manner.’

A Dash of Spring Anime 2012!

Since I just did the Winter Anime post, and I’ve got some free time now I just thought that I’d quickly add a dash of Spring since it’s a pretty short list for now =D I’m sure we’ll live through the next year to be able to watch it since I don’t believe in a 2012 apocalypse, but just in case… everyone pray with me.

As usual, main source is FanSubWiki. Enjoy!

Kimi to Boku Season 2

J.C. Staff, TV Tokyo

The story follows the lives of four teenage boys who have known each other for most of their lives. Their friendship has its ups and downs, but they remain close into high school. A half-Japanese transfer student joins their group and adds a new dynamic to the everyday adolescent friendships depicted in this comedic anime.

Well if any of you are wondering ‘heck, they’ve already prepared a second season?’; the whole series has apparently been split into two seasons with 13 episodes each. If you haven’t watched it yet, it’s a shoujo slice-of-life that has everything but explicitly announced shounen-ai. Or it might pull a No. 6 on me and really turn out to be a kinda sorta partial shounen-ai for shiz. It’s pretty good though so far, worth a watch if you like those everyday life kinda stories =)

Official Source ANN

A Handful of Winter Anime 2011/2012 =)

So from our stats here at MW, it’s pretty much blatantly, in-your-face obvious that most people frequent our blog for all the upcoming anime, so here I’ll give a small dose of what’s to come in Winter this/next year. Enjoy!

Btw, as usual, my main source is from FanSubWiki. Good starting point to look for new anime! =D

December

Kyousogiga

Toei Animation, Web Stream (12/10)

In a world where boundary between human and yokai worlds is no longer distinguishable, 3 different groups pursue for power. What is Count of Reality and Destruction of Negentrophy? Koto, a high school girl who got out of maze of Java Work, chases the shadow of “Kuro Usagi (Black Rabbit)”. This is a story surrounding various people chasing Kuro Usagi in Kyoto, where time has stopped.

Okay everyone, P-L-E-A-S-E watch the PV if you feel that life is worth living. Don’t let the 5 minutes be a total turn-off, from the moment it started I felt like it really captured me. There’s the music, the animation and just the whole atmosphere that just makes it already feel like a wonderful anime. So please watch the PV and share my sentiments XD

Official ANN MAL

Introducing Weekend’s Ani-Manga Mail~

Following the Manga Weekend poll(which for some reason hasn’t closed automatically and I’m too lazy to close it), the clear percentage of you guys out there want ani-manga recommendations! Okay, the poll only said manga recs but anyway. So here I am, hoping to introduce a new line up of posts to serve that demand. What is Weekend’s Ani-Manga Mail? Well, sometimes our recommendation posts of manga and anime are not up your street, which is why we introduce Ani-Manga Mail! It’s where you (yes, you), want some manga or anime recommendations/advice; and we and hopefully some readers, try to help you find something to occupy these various gaps in your life. I’m hoping to make this a weekly feature or monthly feature, depending on the feedback we get. I’m not sure if Manga Weekend is up to this level yet but reader participation will be a key factor in making these posts a success so if you’re a visitor of Manga Weekend, I hope you can join in our little discussions once we have our first participant. 

JManga, scanlations & the Laissez-faire attitude

This post is EXTREMELY late!!! It’d probably be a good idea if you just read it as if JManga was just launched…

A couple of months ago, I was prepping up a post about my 2 cents about the scanlaton community and the coalition. I eventually abandoned the post because of my severe case of laziness, lack of inspiration, as well as no courage. In hopes to revive the declining sales of manga, JManga was recently launched and my interest in the subject has been renewed. Now my information on JManga is outdated since I only caught up with what was going when it was first launched. Even so, I don’t have a 1st hand observation since I’m based in the U to the K. So if anything I say is totally old and irrelevant, I’d be happy if someone corrected me.

What is JManga? To put it vaguely and simply, a legal manga aggregation site. I won’t go on about what it is since many other sites have done so and even better than I, but I do strongly recommend reading About.com’s posts on JManga which you can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here. A good chunk of my thoughts about JManga I have shared on on Organisation ASG’s post on JManga which you can read here. I recommend this post as well, it has many various initial perspectives on JManga.