Sakura Con Coverage - Day 3 (Dark Horse Industry Panel)

The upcoming release dates of quite a few titles were announced at this panel.

Gunsmith Cats: Burst - volume 5 to be released April 18th. They hinted that something exciting that fans have been waiting for is going to happen, so if you like the series, be sure to check it out.

Shinjuku - April 14th

Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Shinji Ikari Raising Project - volume 4 on April 21, volume 5 on June 9th

Card Captor Sakura - July 14th

Hellsing volume 10 - May 19th

Vampire Hunter D - May 19th

Chobits omnibus volume 2 - May 26th

Blade of the Immortal - no new volumes until 2011. They have a new translation team working on this series now. The good news is that The Art of Blade of the Immortal will be available this June 2nd.

Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Art of the Animated Series - June 2nd. It will be hard cover with 184 pages and include lots of behind the scenes, development, and concept work. It should be a great collector's item for fans of the series.

Oh! My Goddess! volume 15 - June 30

Neon Genesis Evangelion: Campus Apocalypse - August 11th

More upcoming graphic novel releases are listed on the Dark Horse website.

Note that the omnibus editions from Dark Horse (for any series) always include extras. That could be more art, interviews, or other things, depending on what type of special content they can acquire and add for the fans.

For fans of Kenichi Sonoda, Canon God Exaxxion is currently on hold because it hasn't performed well thus far. However, if the numbers go up, Dark Horse would be happy to work on making future volumes available.

An audience member asked for Dark Horse's opinion on libraries, wondering if it negatively impacts sales. The representatives said that they love libraries and think they are a great place for people to preview titles and actually encourage sales. They also said that public libraries and school libraries are now both developing collections. So if you've heard about a series and you're not sure about it, check out your local library.

The representatives also said that Dark Horse would be interested in looking into any series that fans would like to see. So feel free to send your suggestions to them! They have been publishing action titles for quite some time but are more recently adding shoujo titles. So they really mean suggest anything. A fan in the audience mentioned Sailor Moon, and they made a note of it. Maybe they will be looking at the Operation Moonrise manga survey results when we post them?

Stay tuned for more Sakura Con convention coverage! There's still more to come.