Present Titles:
Fushigi Yûgi (Yuu Watase) - runs monthly in Animerica Extra, seven collected volumes available Past Titles:
Promise and Since You've Been Gone (Keiko Nishi) - originally published as a comic book (called Promise), collected into Four Shoujo Stories graphic novel (out of print) Future TitlesBasara (Yumi Tamura) - running as bimonthly graphic novels - Summer 2003 HistoryViz is the oldest and largest of the US manga publishers, and has been trying to publish shoujo since early on. Early attempts under a Flower Comics imprint apparently met with little success, the titles probably too obscure. Despite that they continued to publish shoujo titles, even as their bread and butter remained the works of Rumiko Takahashi. Several titles were serialized in Manga Vision, the first manga anthology in the US, and they also began to serialize CLAMP's X(X/1999), probably their longest running shoujo title to date. Viz's shoujo output began an upturn with the debut of their new anthology Animerica Extra, with featured as its flagship title, the fan-favorite Fushigi Yűgi. Many recent acquisitions have been shoujo, including their two big announcements last year, Utena and Ayashi no Ceres. Some have complained at Viz takes too many liberties with translations, others say the opposite, their localizations are not overly liberal. They have listened to fan input, after overwhelming mail stating Chichiri's "no da" should be left alone in Fushigi Yűgi, they complied. They have acknowledged that they have been editing comic in their Viz Kids line, but the only shoujo title that applies to is Magical Pokémon Journey (and thus far the only "edit" has been a few name changes). The US arm of Shogakukan, many of their titles come from their Flower and Petit Flower labels, but they have published works from other companies, most notably Kadokawa (Asuka). |