The big news this weekend was the Anime Expo in LA, with over 40,000 manga, anime and cosplay fans lining up to hear news from all the major players in the field. ComiPress has an exhaustive round-up of links that tell you everything you could ever want to know.
Brigid Alverson has a concise digest which we’ll quote for two of the more interesting panel reports:
ADV: ADV co-founders Jon Ledford and Matt Greenfield acknowledged that the deal with Japanese investor Sojitz has fallen through, but the company has found a new partner. The big but rather vague news is that ADV has a new partner, as the deal with Japanese investor Sojitz has fallen through. More details will be forthcoming at Otakon. While Ledford and Greenfield said they are actively negotiating for new anime licenses, their body language suggested that the manga line is not so robust; the official line is that they would like to finish up their existing licenses but won’t be licensing any new titles in the next 12 months. ANN has video of the panel, which is awesome.
So that explains the anxiety at ADV headquarters of late. Meanwhile, Dark Horse confirmed they are losing some Kodansha licenses:
Dark Horse: They had just one new license to announce, Ikari Shinji Raising Project, an Evangelion spinoff. They passed around the Japanese editions of that and Clover, and someone didn’t return the Clover volume. Not cool! The CLAMP Mangettes are due out in summer 2009. And the Kodansha launch will affect Dark Horse, meaning they will lose some titles, but they wouldn’t give details. And there are no new light novels in the works. (ANN, AoD, Deb Aoki, Ed Chavez, Gia,Japanator)
More: Deb Aoki reports at About.com. Japanator has some photos one of which is ganked above.
