Vertical

Vertical, Inc. has quickly become my go-to provider of manga that I really enjoy that I didn't even know that I wanted. Kou Yaginuma's Twin Spica, Felipe Smith's Peepo Choo, Jiro Matsumoto's Velveteen & Mandala, and especially Nobuaki Tadano's 7 Billion Needles are really good reads. Ve...

In Jiro Matsumoto's Velveteen & Mandala, two high school girls, the eponymous Velveteen and Mandala, go from spending idle time on a riverbank to fighting against hordes of the undead. They're cute schoolgirls -- one blonde, one with black hair -- they've got easy access to weapons, they live in a tank (kinda), their zombie enemies still mill around going on job interviews, and there's a lot o

One of the largest Japanese publishers of manga, Kodansha, announced this week plans to purchase Vertical, an American publisher of english-language editions of Japanese books, including manga. Vertical is known to manga readers for its high quality reprints of material including work by Osamu Tezuka, among others...

As part of our recent editorial about the upheaval in the manga industry, ComicsAlliance had a chance to speak with some of the most influential tastemakers working at American manga publishers today, and their answers were so frank and informative that we thought they deserved their own feature...