After a long period of hiatus, ComiPress' Backstage feature is finally back! This time, the featured site is YaoiSuki is a news and information website founded by Jen Parker and Jordan Marks dedicated to yaoi, also called BL or Boy's Love, an genre aimed toward women that focuses on love between to male characters.

Within a few years, YaoiSuki became the premier information site on yaoi, and its users enjoyed its news, reviews, columns, wiki and various contests. However, on March 1st 2008, YaoiSuki's Jen Parker announced that the site would cease operation, thus ending one of the most successful English yaoi site on web. What kind of site was YaoiSuki? What went on behind the scenes? And what led to the site's demise? Read on to find out!

Read More »

Web Boutique Offers Extensive Collection Of Products Based On Popular Anime And Manga Properties Including BLEACH, NARUTO And DEATH NOTE

San Francisco, CA, April 29, 2008 – VIZ Media, LLC (VIZ Media), one of the entertainment industry's most innovative and comprehensive publishing, animation and licensing companies, has redesigned its official online store at http://store.viz.com.

Read More »

Voting for the first Anime Blog Awards is now closed, and the results of the nomination can be found on this page.

Christopher Butcher's Comics212 is 6 years old!:

It's 6 years to the day since I started blogging at Comics212. I'm a considerably better writer at this point, I think. I actually started writing a column for 212.net in December if 1997, so I guess that was my official serialized writing debut (10 years!), but it wasn’t until April 23 2002 that the blogger software roared to life. :)

According to MangaBlog, Word Balloons, a new group blog aimed at comics for children has been recently launched:

Recently, I became aware of a hole in the blogosphere: Nobody seemed to be blogging regularly about children's comics. I mentioned this to a couple of like-minded folks, and the next thing I knew, Word Balloons was born. [...] Word Balloons will go beyond manga to cover kids' comics in all their glory, including classy graphic novels, cheap and garish floppies, and even webcomics.

According to an announcement from AnimeOnDVD (which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year) founder Chris Beveridge, AoD will be sold to Mania.com:

AnimeOnDVD is very much a community effort and I have a fantastic staff of volunteers who plug away at all manner of reviews and work within the forums. But at the end of the day, it comes down to what I can do with it. And I want to do a lot more with it which is why I decided to sell the site to the folks at Mania.com who I’ve known for several years now. Working with them, I and the entire staff will be taking this site into their larger platform where we’ll be heading up their anime and manga platform.

Also, AoD has now switched its forum software from FusionBB to vBulletin.

The first Anime Blog Awards is now underway:

The Anime Blog Awards is a bridge to highlight the best blogs in their various genres. We hope that the awards can celebrate the excellence of great anime blogs within the anime blogosphere. We also believe that this award will fulfill its desire to promote new or excellent blogs that should be given more attention.

To vote for your favorite blog, you need to own or contribute to a blog yourself. Nominations will end on April 22nd. Included in the award is a category for manga blogs. Go here for more rules.

In order to provide better coverage of the upcoming Tokyo International Anime Fair (TAF) 2008, Anime News Network has launched a new "Japan Blog":

Read More »

Celebrating its soon-to-be 1,000th post and 1,000,000th visitor, yuri blog Okazu has announced two contests, the 1 Million Visitor Art Contest and the 1000th Post Contest.

theOtaku has launched the new "Version Vibrant" of its website:

Welcome to theOtaku.com Version Vibrant. After months of development we are pleased to usher in the birth of a new site, complete with new code, a new design, and 50+ new features. Welcome! Visit this page every day for a quick overview of the activity around our network.