Status of the Fukushima Reactor Accidents

Herschel Smith over at the Captains Journal is posting some excellent updates on the current status and progress of the containment efforts being made at the Fukushima Reactor plant. He is doing a much better job than the main stream media at assessing the situation given the available information.As he points out: "The Japanese are performing heroically, and the main stream media will catch up

Borders Troubles Hit TokyoPop Hard

I've been talking about this a lot recently in our newsletter and blog posts, and have been doing a lot of speculation as to how the Borders failure would effect the US Manga industry (i.e. how hard the publishers would be hit). I think this is a bigger deal than most people realize, but now I'm wondering if perhaps I've been under estimating the impact.Today Stuart Levy, the CEO of TokyoPop,

Borders Store Liquidations Underway / Barnes & Nobel Suspends Dividend

ICv2 reports that the Borders book store liquidations have begun:"Borders has obtained court approval of its store-closing plans and has begun liquidating inventory at the 200 affected locations. DJM Realty is assisting with the store closings and lease assignments. The store closings are part of the restructuring Borders is undertaking under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.Inventory liquidation

Navarre Says No 'Adequate' Offers for Funimation Yet

From Navarre's earnings report released this evening:"Discontinued operations includes the results of FUNimation Entertainment. Net income from discontinued operations during the third quarter was $1.8 million, as compared to $928,000 in the prior fiscal year. Strong earnings performance in discontinued operations resulted from solid year-over-year sales growth. Cash flow from discontinued

FUNimation Shifts Digital Strategy - Sues Downloaders

FUNimation Sues 1,337 Downloaders. From ICv2:Anime distributor FUNimation Entertainment has filed suit in Texas against 1,337 individuals who it accuses of using BitTorrent sites, including isohunt.com, kickasstorrents.com, and nyaatorrents.org, to download copies of One Piece #481: Ace Rescued! Whitebeard’s Final Order!. The suit identifies the individuals only by the IP address used to download

Navarre May End Up Keeping Funimation

Navarre's 3rd quarter (Q2 fiscal) earnings call earlier this week was quite revealing. They reported a quarterly profit of $1.7 million for the FUNimation division (now reported as “'discontinued operations'), vs. $435,000 in the year ago period. Now while that looks pretty good, keep in mind the year over year is up against the truly abysmal Q3 numbers everyone was turning in last year, and that

TokyoPop Hires former CMX Exec

We all are aware of the declining fortunes of manga publisher TokyoPop. They have gone from a 40 issue a month company to a 10 issue a month company over the past 3 years, and have recently allowed much of their manga back catalog - even for ongoing series - to go out of print (to the consternation of fans and retailers alike). ICv2's Q3 2010 list of top selling manga properties show TokyoPop had

Cat Shit One - If RACS can't ship it, you should skip it!

Production company IDA Entertainment (another brilliantly run Japanese managed Anime firm) has announced that they intend to release Cat Shit One - at least the single episode that has actually been produced - on DVD and BD here in the US in December.The big downer? It will only be available from Amazon. IDA says because they wanted to handle international distribution for this video on their own

Media Blasters / Allegro Media Partnership

Media Blasters made the announcement this week that they have struck a deal with Allegro Media (a small entertainment media firm that hasn't updated the news section of their website since January) to handle sales and distribution of all Media Blasters Anime and movie labels starting in December. That includes everything published under the Anime Works, Tokyo Shock, and their other live action

Stuff

I do have some comments to make on Media Blasters deal with Allegro Media, with the new regular/limited edition packaging for Funimation releases starting in January, and on a few other recent news events. Should have some posts up about them in the next couple of days.

Japanese and US Publishers Declare War on 'Pirate Scum'

Finally waking up and smelling the impending doom, manga publishers both here and in Japan have suddenly realized that the proliferation of scanlations and illegal content posted online for free is a direct threat to the survival of the manga industry.From the Anime economatrix this week:"The 36 publishers in Japan's Digital Comic Association and several American publishers are forming a

Navarre Can No Longer Afford Funimation's Great Results...

If CMX's announced exit from the Manga market last week was equivalent to a hand grenade, this is a tactical nuke from orbit. From the Economatrix earlier today:"Navarre Corporation has announced on Thursday that it has hired the investment bank Houlihan Lokey "to assist it in structuring and negotiating a potential transaction for the sale" of its Funimation anime arm. The plans may not result

Signs Of The Apocalype - CMX Manga Shutting Down in July

From ICv2:"DC is closing down its CMX manga unit, effective July 1st. The company will cease publishing all CMX titles other than Megatokyo (its OEL title) which will continue under the DC Comics imprint.We asked DC whether U.S. publishing rights would revert to the Japanese publishers or if DC was planning to try to sell or sub-license the rights, and received a 'No comment' from a DC

FBI Shuts Down Comic Scan Site

From ICv2:"The FBI has shut down comic scan site htmlcomics.com and seized its servers in a raid supported by a consortium of comic publishers, according to an announcement by Katten Muchen Rosenman, the law firm representing the publishers consortium. Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Bongo, Archie, Conan Properties, Mirage, and United Media were involved. Htmlcomics.com was the largest site offering

Toei Shopping Out Sailor Moon

ICv2 Reported This Morning:"Toei Animation is offering 200 refurbished episodes of the Sailor Moon Magical Girl anime at the MIPTV market that will be held next week in Cannes. MIPTV is a worldwide content market at which producers such as Toei offer their wares to representatives of TV networks and syndicators of electronic entertainment from more than 100 countries. In addition to the Sailor