Japan

The June 2008 issue of Ichijinsha's Comic Yurihime magazine will officially announce the titles of girl's light novels that will be published under Ichijinsha's new light novel label, Ichijinsha Bunko. LightNovel.org has a list of the titles in English.

Source: 2ch

Hit Shuppansha's adult/loli manga magazine Comic Shoujo Tengoku will be succeeded by a new loli manga magazine titled Comic ino.. The first issue of Comic ino. will be released on April 18th.

Comic Shoujo Tengoku was published monthly for 5 years - from March 18th, 2003 to March 18th, 2008.

Source: Toranoana

According to Canned Dogs, artist Ishii Meguru was arrested in Yokohama for committing "indecent acts with a 15 year old girl through November and December last year for a total of 4 times.":

The article reports that Ishii Meguru was an artist for the novelized version of Higurashi no naku koro ni (though he only did some art for Ichijinsha's novel anthologies, the artist for the official higurashi novels is Tomohi), and that he was also popular among fans of gothic lolita.

Recently the Japanese news program "Broadcaster" ran a report on the anniversary collaboration between Shonen Sunday and Shonen Magazine. Rumiko Takahashi's Urusei Yatsura was mentioned in the report as the key to Shonen Sunday's sucess in the 1980s.

Source: Rumic World

From Daily Yomiuri comes an article on how Daisaku Tsuru, an assistant cultural anthropology professor at Toyama University, is creating a manga titled Nacun that focuses on the "mystery of life, with the sea in Okinawa Prefecture as its background.":

Tsuru debuted as a mangaka in 2006 with Nacun, a series that has been carried in Afternoon, a monthly magazine published by Kodansha Ltd. Nacun is based on Tsuru's own experience of having researched fishing culture on an isolated island in Okinawa Prefecture for a total of six months while at graduate school.

ANN reports that issue 18 of Kodansha's Morning magazine announced that Morning 2 will become a monthly manga magazine starting April 30:

The magazine had published eight issues on an irregular, but roughly bimonthly, schedule since September of 2006.

2008.4.8 ??? It's that time of the year again when school kids in Japan return to school beneath the showers of cherry blossom petals, and draw hearts on envelopes containing love confessions to their future sweethearts (a few heartbreakers too...but we're optimists here at Wacom). To celebrate this time of year, we'd like to invite anime and manga artists to illustrate your own anime/manga scene of your first love for the 2nd Wacom Anime/Manga Contest on the Wacom Community. Good luck!!

More info and online entry here:
http://www.wacom-asia.com/community/contests/anime2/index.php

Theme: "My First Love"
Awards: Grand Prize, Most Romantic Moment Award, Kawaii (Cute) Award

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From Canned Dogs comes an story about the troubles of Wakaki Tamiki, a Shounen Sunday manga artist responsible for series like Seikesshou Albatross. According Tamiki's latest blog post, he is extremely short on money at the moment, with less than 10,000 yen in his bank account:

He would have no money to pay the utilities bills, but he managed to get an advance from Shounen Sunday for the manga that's starting serialization in the next issue.