Breaking News: Sailor Moon Manga Going Out of Print?

And A Creative Manga Sighting in a North American Magazine!

We read this story on the Genvid Forums and we had to investigate. The reprints of the Sailor Moon Manga and books about PGSM are all going out of print with (loosely translated) an undetermined reprint date according to Kodansha. The Manga had gone into reprints in Fall of 2003 to coincide with the premiere of PGSM. Looking at a worst-case scenario, we decided to look at the DVD situation of PGSM and noticed that the DVDs of PGSM are all priced 15% off - which still comes to a hefty $45 per volume (from Bandai Visual). It doesn’t appear those are going out of print any time soon.

But from some stories we have read, perhaps these books going out of print is a normal thing. Even the most popular mangas in Japan aren’t constantly in print, but sometimes the publishers print out enough copies so that they may still be found in Japan. It may be a little harder though for fans outside of Japan to find them online, and short of eBay or looking at Japanese Online Bookstores, we really don’t have any other suggestions. If fans find good online stores, they are more than welcome to post links in our comments section below this post. The Reprint Date TBD that is listed on the bottom of each listing is somewhat relieving as there is some hope that the manga could return. We will try to contact Kodansha soon to confirm whether there is a possibility of the manga’s return in the future, or if it is a done deal. We think it is likely the first case.

In the meantime though, one of our longtime Moon Chase friends, K-Max of K-Max Media pointed this out to us. Wired Magazine is devoted to technology and geek culture, and in this month’s issue did a spread all about the rise of manga in North America. K-Max was also reminded of a spread they did years ago about the futuristic culture in Japan. As expected though, Wired’s spread did have a Sailor sighting in its look at the history of Manga in North America - which was told in manga style! The artist drew a convincing Sailor Moon lookalike when discussing the impact of Sailor Moon on the North American market. The manga does take an interesting look at copyright issues relating to doujinshi and fan manga. Fans can check out some other articles on manga from Wired here, here, here and here.