Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/29

If I were a betting man, I'd be willing to lay down some serious moolah that today's post will be the least-trafficked "Reviewing the Mail" post of the year.; I expect everyone will be busy with other things, and not reading blogs as assiduously this Monday morning as they do other weeks.

And that's just fine with me, since I've been writing much less assiduously over this vacation week -- or not writing at all, most of the time -- so it seems only fair.

Anyway, as usual this post lists whatever came in my mail last week -- which, this time, is four manga volumes from Yen (and that means my old colleague -- we started at Wiley the same day -- Ellen Wright was working last week, even if no one else in publishing was). All are coming in January, which is looming very close. I haven't read these books yet, but here's what I can tell you about them:

The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, Vol. 3 continues a Haruhi Suzumiya side-story, with a story from series creator Nagaru Tanigawa and art by Puyo. As you know Bob, the Haruhi stories began as light novels illustrated by Noizi Ito (who is credited here for character design), and have since expanded nearly to the limits of the known universe -- besides the novels, the main manga, the TV anime, the anime movie, the audio dramas, and the videogames, there's also another manga side-story that began earlier this year and an official parody 4-koma manga. (Notice how I carefully try to hide the fact that I'm not familiar with the content of any of those media properties, since I haven't read them? Oops....)

Kaoru Mori's A Bride's Story -- an interesting historical story that follows an Englishman down the 19th century Silk Road through central Asia, with each volume covering one stop, and one young woman's journey to marriage at that location -- reaches a fourth volume with a stop at a small fishing village on the Aral Sea. The bride this time is actually twin sisters -- you're not seeing double on that cover -- Laila and Leily, who energetically seek a pair of wealthy and handsome brothers for themselves.

Yana Toboso's popular Black Butler series, about a young British lord in a world that's not quite our own, and (more importantly) his amazingly resourceful butler, Sebastian, continues into a twelfth volume. The main cast is still on the Campania, a ship hired by the Aurora Society to show off a resurrection process, but that process has gone, predictably, very wrong, and the creatures the back cover copy carefully does not call zombies are shuffling about, wreaking havoc, as the ship meanders towards a gigantic iceberg.

And last for this week is Black God, Vol. 18, the very exciting boys' manga by Korean creators Dall-Young Lim and Sung-Woo Park. (See my reviews of volumes 2, 3, 4, and 15 for more details -- this one is a lot of fun in that superpowered all-fighting mode of Bleach and Naruto.)