With Thanksgiving just around the corner, this is a fairly quiet week for new manga. Viz has finished their manga releases for the week, and Kodansha is holding off on a few until next week. That leaves one very interesting new title from Yen Press and a handful of new volumes in series that have been chugging along for a while.

This is the week when Yen Press releases its November books, and they have a new series debuting this month: The Innocent, a supernatural-mystery series about a detective who was wrongly executed for crimes he didn't commit and who now seeks to save other innocents from a similar fate. If he succeeds, he will have a chance to return to his old life, but he must struggle against his need to seek revenge against those who framed him. This looks like an interesting read for the long weekend. Read more...

Tags Kodansha Comics, Manga, Natsume Ono, Sailor Moon, Vertical, VIZ, Yen Press

Manga is tricky to give as a gift. If the person you're buying for already reads manga, they probably already own every book they want, while those who don't read it regularly have trouble getting past the stylized look and the right-to-left orientation. Fortunately, publishers are offering lots of extras this year, as well as a wide range of stories that appeal to many different types of readers.

So we will start this year's gift guide with manga you could give to almost anyone, and we will wind up with some gifts for the manga fan who has everything.

For the Disney fan…
Princess Knight, by Osamu Tezuka (2 volumes)

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Tags cats, D.Gray-Man, Digital Manga, Gift Guides, Holiday Gift Guide, Manga, Natsume Ono, Osamu Tezuka, Princess Knight, Vampire Knight, VIZ

From revivals of beloved childhood characters to surprising encounters between pop-culture icons, 2011 was definitely a key year for Geek. Here's our picks for the ten best moments in Geek in 2011:

10. Womanthology Raises over $100,000 on Kickstarter

The significance of this story was two-fold: both demonstrating the power of Kickstarter as a crowd-sourced project-funding tool, and highlighting the issue of a lack of female creators in mainstream comics. Womanthology -- a collection of comics by women spearheaded by artist Renae De Liz -- raised over $100K in only 30 days, far in excess of its original goal of $25,000. Such a massive show of support for women in comics, including celebrity funding contributors Kevin Smith, Jim Lee, and Neil Gaiman, demonstrated that yes, people do want to read and support comic projects by women. With the massive IDW-published anthology on its way to becoming a reality, maybe the next step will be more women actually being hired by mainstream comics publishers.

9. Kevin Keller Mini-Series by Archie Comics

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Tags Archie Comics, Batman: Arkham City, best of 2011, Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin, Kevin Keller, Miles Morales, New 52, Sailor Moon, Star Trek, Star Wars, Thundercats, Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man, Womanthology

A handful of teenagers are left in a bleak landscape and set upon by killer robots. Who will survive? Psyren, the newest Shonen Jump manga from Viz, does not shy away from cliche, but the story also has a few twists to keep it interesting.

Right from the beginning, we know Ageha Yoshina is a tough guy with a heart of gold; on page two, he singlehandedly clobbers a guy twice his size who was stalking a friend of his. (He charges a fee, but it's clear he's not in it for the money.) He's a pretty typical Shonen Jump kind of guy, good-hearted, not a deep thinker, henpecked by his older sister but capable of kicking serious ass when the occasion calls for it. "Ageha Yoshina. He's rowdy. but kind," one character says of him. Just the kind of guy you want by your side in a deadly game of survival.

The mystery begins when Ageha hears a pay phone ring and, in his helpful way, picks it up. Some sort of mysterious creature appears, holding a cell phone, then vanishes, and when it is gone, Ageha finds a phone card marked Psyren in the phone booth. Having no idea what to make of this, Ageha pockets the phone card and heads home. Read more...

Tags Manga, Review, Shonen Jump

This week's new manga releases to bookstores is short, but there isn't a bad one in the bunch.

This is the week Sailor Moon fans have been waiting for, as vol. 2 of Sailor Moon and vol. 2 of Codename Sailor V hit bookstore shelves. Kodansha also has another book with a very different feel due out this week: Vol. 8 of Ninja Girls, which is one of those stories that is ably summed up by the title—it's about a boy who is sort of a loser until a beautiful ninja girl tells him he is really the heir to the throne, and she and her legions of beautiful ninja girl warriors vow to help him regain his birthright. So basically, Kodansha is all about the girl soldiers this week, although Ninja Girls will probably appeal to a much different set of readers than Sailor Moon.

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Tags Kodansha, Manga, manga guides, No Starch Press, Sailor Moon, VIZ, Yen Plus, Yen Press

Viz Media announced some ambitious plans at New York Comic-Con last month: They are taking Shonen Jump from a monthly print magazine to a digital weekly—and once they do, they will be running each chapter of Naruto and five other manga just two weeks after it appears in Japan.

That means they have some catching up to do: Volume 58 of Naruto was just released in Japan last week, meaning there is a five-volume gap between the American and the Japanese releases. In order to close the gap in time, Viz is publishing the next few volumes digitally way ahead of their print release dates on both the Vizmanga.com website and their iPad/iPod app. Volume 54 is available now, and volume 55 will be out on November 21. Dead-tree enthusiasts will have to wait for January and March, respectively, for the two volumes. Read more...

Tags Bakuman, Bleach, Digital Comics, Manga, Naruto, One Piece, Shonen Jump, VIZ

Arina Tanemura, creator of Kamikaze Kaito Jeanne, Full Moon O Sagashite, The Gentlemen's Alliance Cross, and a host of other shoujo manga, is ending her exclusive agreement with the Japanese manga magazine Ribon, which has been publishing most of her work up to now. Tanemura said she will continue to work on her current series, Sakura Hime: The Legend of Princess Sakura, which runs in Ribon, until it is finished.

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Tags Arina Tanemura, Manga, VIZ

As the holidays draw near, it's a busy time for manga lovers. Here at MTV Geek, we recently went over the week's new releases, previewed an entire chapter of CLAMP's new manga, Gate 7, and interviewed Fairy Tail creator Hiro Mashima. Here's a roundup of news from other places.

Manga Publishing

At Publishers Weekly, Danica Davidson takes a look at the popularity of manga art books, such as the Vampire Knight book we reviewed a few weeks ago.

If you're interested in what goes on behind the scenes in manga publishing, here is a bit of historical perspective. Two longtime manga editors spill the beans in Anime News Network's ANNCast podcasts: Jake Tarbox, the original editor of CMX Manga, and former Tokyopop exec Mike Kiley. Read more...

Tags artbooks, cats, CLAMP, CMX Manga, Dark Horse, Digital Comics, Digital Manga, Manga, Princess Knight, Tokyo Mew Mew, TOKYOPOP

We observe Yozo Oba, the disaffected, profoundly damaged lead in Usamaru Furuya's No Longer Human like some kind of bug under glass which has been given the ability to report on the outside world. The observations are in our language, but uncomfortably outside of our range of experience. Oba, who's online diary entries comprise the bulk of No More Human's story realizes that there's something skewed with him and how he sees the world, but he considers the people around him, the "normal" ones, somehow defective.

Yozo Oba is actually the creation of Japanese novelist Osamu Dazai, himself a troubled individual who used the novel as a thinly-veiled autobiography detailing his own aimlessness, decadence, and alienation during his youth and in the years following World War II. Furuya takes the novel and sets in modern Japan, keeping the first-person-account aspect but curiously making it an online journal discovered by an unidentified manga artist. I say "curious" only because at this stage, there's no clear sense of any impact the framing device might make on the story, save to create a parallel between "Oba," the persona in the journal and the "real" Oba, matching the Oba/Dazai parallel. Read more...

Tags No Longer Human, Random House, Usamaru Furuya, Vertical Inc.

Most of this week's new manga has a familiar feeling to it—either it's reissues of classic tales or something new from a veteran creator. Think of it as the manga equivalent of comfort food, just the thing for an autumn day.

Vertical kicks off November with a classic: Osamu Tezuka's Princess Knight, the original gender-bender adventure manga about a princess who must masquerade as a prince in order to inherit her kingdom. The story was originally published in Japan in the 1950s, although there are several versions, and Kodansha published a bilingual English/Japanese edition, but this is the first English edition that is just for manga fans. Also new from Vertical this week is vol. 10 of Twin Spica, the story of a girl's adventures during astronaut training. Read more...

Tags CLAMP, Hiro Mashima, Kodansha, Manga, Osamu Tezuka, Vertical, VIZ