by Brian Camp

At Anime Expo this year, one of the surprise guests accompanying Morning Musume on their historic first trip to America was none other than Hitomi Yoshizawa, the last group leader of MM before the current one, Ai Takahashi. Yoshizawa was a member of the 4th Generation of Morning Musume (which is now up to 8th Gen), having joined in 2000, and graduated from the group in May 2007. She is current...

By Jason Thompson

Welcome to Wakaba-soh publisher: Yen Press story and art: Chaco Abeno rating: 16+ Kentarou, a short 15-year-old, is in love with Karen, a prim-and- proper girl from a rich family. His mind is blown when he discovers that Karen is taking a year off of school to be the caretaker of his student apartment building, Wakaba-soh, a rundown place full of cute high school girls who always leave their u...

By Clarissa Graffeo

Sports manga and anime haven't traditionally been released here in the US very often. In Japan, they tend to make up some of the most popular, enduring titles and several have been extraordinarily influential classics. Baseball in particular is a major sport in Japan, so Big Windup! has a substantial number of fellow manga and anime that have never (and for many, probably will never) been rele...

By Daryl Surat

Sometimes you don't know just how good you've got it until it's gone. When one of the oldest anime publishers in America, Central Park Media, went out of business earlier this year, most fans didn’t really notice. The company had been largely dormant for the last several years, not releasing new titles as their already marked-down catalog became increasingly scarce. But as an anime fan whose f...

By Caleb Dunaway

When They Cry 3: Umineko no Naku Koro ni (“When the Seagulls Cry”) is not, in the strictest sense, a sequel to the events of the first two When They Cry/Higurashi game/anime series. Indeed, most of the main cast of Umineko are in no way related to the now-familiar denizens of Hinamizawa, and the narrative sequence of Umineko is easily enjoyable bereft of knowledge of Higurashi . There are conn...

By Joseph Luster

Neon Genesis Evangelion came out at an interesting time, which is one of the reasons it has such a bizarre collection of videogame adaptations under its belt. Technically, around the time of the show's debut in 1995, some regions of the world still tolerated vaguely FMV- (full-motion video) fueled fare, as if we were still living under the oppressive Sega CD regime. Early Eva games begged a se...

By Zac Bentz

Shinshoku Dolce , the debut album from singer, cellist and illustrator Kanon Wakeshima, has the stamp of producer Mana all over it. Sure, Kanon is able to project her own voice, both literally and figuratively, throughout the album, most notably in her cello playing. Yet despite the obvious emphasis on her cello skill, the music is oddly thin on any actual cello playing. Or rather, the cello i...