Yep, Judo's over. It was fun though!

Anyway, on to it! Plug!

Manga Recon's new weekly Mini's program rolls on! This week's Mini's include Forest of Gray City vol. 2, Kekkaishi vol. 14 and Pumpkin Scissors vol. 3. Meanwhile, yours truly takes a look at the first two volumes of CMX's release of Dorothea! Katherine takes a gander at the two volumes of Cat-Eyed Boy by horror master Kazuo Umezu, and Chloe covers Bring it On vol. 5, manwha series from Yen Press.

What seems to be the big news of the week is Digital's eManga site going live. Mangablog posted the full press release here, it sounds.. interesting? Here's a summary from aforementioned link.

Digital Manga has jumped headfirst into the web manga world with a new site, emanga.com, that will put entire volumes of manga online. The model looks like it’s similar to Netcomics: readers pay (in points) to read a volume online for a limited time; if they “rent” the volume again, though, they will get unlimited reads.

Over at Anime on DVD, word from Otakon is that the failure of GaoGaiGar to be a huge hit has resulted in Media Blasters having to drop plans for other classic mecha series, with Gear Fighter Dendoh being named specifically. This actually one of the few anime series I'm really curious about at the moment. I've been toying with the idea of picking up the first boxed set for GaoGaiGar for a few months now. It's only $30 or so and I think it's a 5 or 6 disk set. The second boxed set came out earlier this month and is similarily priced.

Speaking of anime... IFC's aired two of three announced series for '08, Witchblade and Speed Grapher. The third series, Hell Girl, has been slowly rolled out via the IFC On Demand service. Lately I've stumbled across some questions as to whether it'll run on the normal channel as it's not listed on their schedule at all. I'm hoping they do as it's the only one of the three series that really interested me at all. Hm.. this all reminds me that I'm a bit bitter at them for not grabbing Mushishi, ah well.

And finally on a local Boston area note, The Brattle will be running a limited engagement of The Girl Who Lept Through Time. It'll be running from Friday the 22nd until Sun. the 24th. Click here for more details.