Calling all Assassin’s Creed players, Hidden Ones, and manga fans! We've got all the release details on our Free Comic Book Day 2021 titles, Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Blood Brothers and Assassin's Creed Dynasty right here!
Internationally, Hayao Miyazaki has to be the most beloved animator, cartoonist and manga-ka who has ever emerged from Japan. Here in the United States of America, this is very clearly the case. Miyazaki has retired, but his influence is all over the place. When you look at the works of 22 young American artists, most of who are Asian-American, you can see that Miyazaki will be influential for decades to come.
Long before the advent of air conditioning, which is pretty much ubiquitous in Japan, the Japanese people needed to learn to cope with their hot, sticky Summer climate. To that end, the whole period is liberally scattered with outdoor festivals. When it's too hot to sleep, you take your mind off of the misery by going to visit shrines, temples, and town squares, where street food, drink and dancing help make the hot season bearable. The traditions have held to this day.
In the past 25 years, Anime Expo has grown from an average Anime convention in Northern California, to a monster event taking up the palatial Los Angeles Convention Center in the Entertainment Capital of the World. Over 100,000 unique attendees managed to fit in the blocks-long complex, making AX second only to San Diego Comic-Con International in attendance. TOKYOPOP had its first booth in the Exhibit Hall in a long, long time, and we returned with a big splash.
CatConLA is a yearly event that was inspired by the rise of a global Internet cat culture. This year, CatConLA took up twice the space in the huge building, occupying not one but two floors. Attendance was up — 15,000 unique visitors, as opposed to 13,000 last year. There was a lot of overlap between the primary audience of the event — cat lovers — and other things our audience enjoys like visual storytelling, Asian art and pop culture, and cosplay.
While Japanese audiences await Shin-Gojira, Hideaki Anno and his myriad partners have been busily creating tie-ins between the gigantic radioactive beast and other stalwarts of J-Pop culture, most notably Neon Genesis Evangelion. However, the weirdest crossover yet is about to happen: Shin-Gojira's appearance on the long-running anime series Crayon Shin-chan. This will be the first time that Godzilla has appeared in a Japanese-made anime.
After publisher Kodansha announced earlier this year that a new Cardcaptor Sakura manga was on the way, and that it wasn’t going to be a one-time deal, but a full-fledged sequel series. And just today, Sakura made her triumphant return to the pages of monthly girls’ manga anthology Nakayoshi with the start of the story’s “Clear Card Arc,” in which the titular card capturer, plus her friends Tomoyo and Syaoran, are now junior high school students.
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