Manga

Sailor Moon is setting sail for the U.S. after a six-year absence in print. Kodansha USA Publishing said Friday that it will release new deluxe editions centering on the iconic manga character that helped cement the Japanese comic art form with American readers in the late 1990s. Out of print for six years, Naoko Takeuchi's "Sailor Moon" will relaunch in September under the Kodansha Comics imprint. It will be accompanied by a two-volume prequel series titled "Codename: Sailor V," the first time it will be in print in the U.S. In it, teenager Minako Aino will fight as Sailor V against the Dark Agency before discovering Sailor Moon.

Using Walter Isaacson's best-selling biography as a frame, award-winning author Mari Yamazaki has created a manga version of the life of Apple founder Steve Jobs. It's being serialized in the Japanese comic magazine Kiss, alongside tales of teen love. So it's not surprising, then, that Jobs is portrayed as " a cute, doe-eyed kid who worries about whether his adoptive parents love him," writes Sam Byford at the Verge. In the first installment, he also grows into a rebellious teenager; the Verge has a shot of the frame in which Jobs reclines on the grass, smoking a joint.

Readers over 30 may not recognize manga artist Takehiko Inoue's name, but teens and twentysomethings in America, Japan, France, Brazil and 19 other countries follow the misadventures of basketball star wanna-be Hanamichi Sakuragi in "Slam Dunk," samurai Miyamoto Musashi's progress on the musha shugyo ("warrior's path") in "Vagabond" and the struggles of wheelchair basketball ace Kiyoharu Togawa in "Real." Inoue has sold more than 157 million books worldwide. Born in 1967 in Kagoshima prefecture, Inoue attended Kumamoto University but dropped out to concentrate on manga.

Images of a city smoldering and a river clogged with pale, radioactive cadavers never left Keiji Nakazawa's mind. The Japanese manga, or comic-book, artist used those images and other memories of surviving the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to create "Barefoot Gen," a gruesome yet hope-driven comic about a boy who, like Nakazawa, survived the Aug. 6, 1945, attack. Nakazawa was a first-grader standing outside his school when the United States dropped the bomb that killed more than 100,000 people, including his father, brother and a sister.

In a world that judges a book by its cover, Chip Kidd is a visual genius in high demand. The author, graphic designer and pop culture connoisseur is the art director for publisher Alfred A. Knopf, but like many of the superheroes he adores, Kidd has a secret identity -- as a "Batman purist." The 44-year-old (who's designed memorable covers for the novels of Cormac McCarthy, James Ellroy, Larry McMurtry, Elmore Leonard and Michael Crichton) had a childhood fascination with the Caped Crusader that has turned into an obsession.

Although HE'S the hero of one of the most popular manga series in the U.S. and Japan, Ichigo Kurosaki has little in common with conventional good guys. He's a scrawny high school student whose spiky orange hair attracts a lot of unwelcome attention. (It's that color naturally; people call him "Strawberry," but "Pumpkin" would be more like it.) He's not the easiest guy in the world to get along with: "I've got a bad temper, so I get in fights easily. If the faculty hassles me, I usually mouth off. Then they say I have a behavior problem and the whole thing snowballs."

Hell hath no fury like an angry fanboy. "Dragonball Evolution," set to hit U.S. theaters today, is already reaching legendary status as the 2009 film fans love to hate, at least as far as the Internet is concerned. The makers of the live-action film hoped to tap into a built-in audience by adapting the hugely popular manga epic that had already spawned three anime series, 17 animated feature films and three television specials. Fans all over the world love "Dragon Ball," but, well, it's a thin line between love and hate.

The smiling boy with the pointy hairdo flying into theaters today in David Bowers' computer-generated film "Astro Boy" isn't just a clever diversion for the kids. He's got a storied past that helped revolutionize manga and launch the artistic explosion that became anime. He also paved the way for the "Pokemon," "Naruto" and "Yu-Gi-Oh" cartoons currently on American airwaves. After a failed outing early in 1951, when graphic novelist and filmmaker Osamu Tezuka first introduced the robot as the peacemaking Ambassador Atom in a Japanese magazine for boys, "Astro Boy" as we know him was launched a year later.

I never quite got anime. Yes, I watched the Japanese animated series "Speed Racer" growing up, and I'm impressed by Hayao Miyazaki, the director of the anime films "Spirited Away" and "My Neighbor Totoro." But if I happen to visit a comic book store, I gravitate to Marvel and DC, steering far clear of the anime-style Japanese comic books known as manga. A newish San Francisco hotel was about to challenge my thinking and prove what a global pop culture phenomenon anime is. Two years ago, boutique hotel chain Joie de Vivre reopened the Best Western Miyako Inn in Japantown as the anime-infused Hotel Tomo.

The titles in one corner of Kinokuniya bookstore in Tokyo's Shinjuku district suggest the kind of themes that manga comics fans crave: romance, feudal-era adventure, betrayal. But above the packed bookshelves a sign reads, "Adult manga. " It's the hard-core content within this genre of comics or cartoons, depicting rape, incest and sex crimes, that lawmakers in Tokyo want to keep out of the hands of minors. The Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly on Wednesday approved an ordinance that makes it illegal to sell or rent sexually explicit manga and anime that "unjustifiably glorifies" violent sexual acts to anyone younger than 18. The law, which goes into effect next year, also bans images of fictional characters that appear to be underage and are engaging in sexual acts.

Think of Japanese movies, and two things readily come to mind: samurai and anime. But organizers of the L.A. EigaFest - a showcase of contemporary cinema from the Land of the Rising Sun - aim to show Angelenos that the nation's filmmakers are up to much more than that. The festival, now in its second year, runs Friday through Sunday at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood and features films on such topics as an unraveling supermodel, a time-traveling Roman architect and a single mother raising two werewolf children.

When last we visited “The Drops of God,” the totally addicting wine manga , the two protagonists were just beginning their battle to decide who would be the emperor of wine. In one corner, ingenue Kanzaki Shizuku, the son of Japan's most legendary wine writer who had forsaken his birthright and gone to work in, gasp, a beer distributorship! In the other, Tomine Issei, a darkly handsome, gifted young wine critic with troublesome values. To decide the winner, the two have to parse Kanzaki's father's clues and identify a series of wines.

The Angry Buddhist A Novel Seth Greenland Europa Editions: 400 pp., $16 paper Seth Greenland's "The Angry Buddhist" begins with two sexy American women getting matching tattoos in Puerto Vallarta - and then it swiftly jumps forward into the madcap final week of a congressional race out in the desert around Palm Springs. The incumbent, a wily and infinitely pragmatic political sleazebag named Randall Duke, finds himself facing a new kind of problem, namely, an opponent who might actually defeat him. Her name is Mary Swain, and here she is, observed at a rally by the angry Buddhist of the title, one of Randall's brothers, the busted cop called Jimmy Ray Duke: "She glides to the microphone and Jimmy notes the burnished skin, the blinding smile, the five hundred dollars' worth of blond highlights, fitted red blouse set off against the matching white linen skin and jacket that wraps her like cellophane.

The Batman Files Matthew K. Manning Andrews McMeel, $100 A vivid assortment of "files" on everything in Bruce Wayne's world - gadgetry, enemies, police records, dossiers - collected by Wayne as a guide for helping his future successor. Government Issue Comics for the People, 1940s-2000s Richard L. Graham Abrams Comicarts, $29.95 How U.S. government agencies have used comic characters - Lil Abner in the Navy, for example, or Bert the Turtle surviving an atomic blast - to spread information to the public.

Sailor Moon is setting sail for the U.S. after a six-year absence in print. Kodansha USA Publishing said Friday that it will release new deluxe editions centering on the iconic manga character that helped cement the Japanese comic art form with American readers in the late 1990s. Out of print for six years, Naoko Takeuchi's "Sailor Moon" will relaunch in September under the Kodansha Comics imprint. It will be accompanied by a two-volume prequel series titled "Codename: Sailor V," the first time it will be in print in the U.S. In it, teenager Minako Aino will fight as Sailor V against the Dark Agency before discovering Sailor Moon.

The titles in one corner of Kinokuniya bookstore in Tokyo's Shinjuku district suggest the kind of themes that manga comics fans crave: romance, feudal-era adventure, betrayal. But above the packed bookshelves a sign reads, "Adult manga. " It's the hard-core content within this genre of comics or cartoons, depicting rape, incest and sex crimes, that lawmakers in Tokyo want to keep out of the hands of minors. The Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly on Wednesday approved an ordinance that makes it illegal to sell or rent sexually explicit manga and anime that "unjustifiably glorifies" violent sexual acts to anyone younger than 18. The law, which goes into effect next year, also bans images of fictional characters that appear to be underage and are engaging in sexual acts.

When last we visited “The Drops of God,” the totally addicting wine manga , the two protagonists were just beginning their battle to decide who would be the emperor of wine. In one corner, ingenue Kanzaki Shizuku, the son of Japan's most legendary wine writer who had forsaken his birthright and gone to work in, gasp, a beer distributorship! In the other, Tomine Issei, a darkly handsome, gifted young wine critic with troublesome values. To decide the winner, the two have to parse Kanzaki's father's clues and identify a series of wines.

The only foreign director to win the Academy Award for best animated feature, Hayao Miyazaki, 68, is the most admired and influential filmmaker working in animation today. His latest film, "Ponyo," opened earlier this month in America in 927 theaters -- a record for a Japanese animated feature. ("Ponyo" was the No. 1 box office hit in Japan in 2008, earning more than 14.9 billion yen -- more than $155 million -- to become the eighth-highest-grossing film in Japanese history.) Miyazaki's work has attracted praise not only from critics, including The Times' Kenneth Turan, but from the artists leading the renaissance in animation: John Lasseter and the other Pixar directors, four-time Oscar winner Nick Park of "Wallace & Gromit" fame, and Frédéric Back, the Oscar-winning creator of "The Man Who Planted Trees."

Unlike their counterparts in the squeaky-clean world of American comics, the teenagers in Takehiko Inoue's award-winning manga series "Real" face graver problems than: Will Archie ask Betty or Veronica to the hop? Intensely dedicated Kiyoharu Togawa was about to become the top junior high sprinter in Japan; then his right leg was partially amputated because of osteosarcoma. Hisanobu Takahashi, the arrogant captain of the Nishi High basketball team, stole a bicycle to impress a girl and rode into the path of a dump trunk.

Readers over 30 may not recognize manga artist Takehiko Inoue's name, but teens and twentysomethings in America, Japan, France, Brazil and 19 other countries follow the misadventures of basketball star wanna-be Hanamichi Sakuragi in "Slam Dunk," samurai Miyamoto Musashi's progress on the musha shugyo ("warrior's path") in "Vagabond" and the struggles of wheelchair basketball ace Kiyoharu Togawa in "Real." Inoue has sold more than 157 million books worldwide. Born in 1967 in Kagoshima prefecture, Inoue attended Kumamoto University but dropped out to concentrate on manga.