According to Canned Dogs, the Japanese blog Katsujichuudoku has discovered the reason why Takehiko Inoue decied to serialize Vagabond in Kodansha's Evening magazine after his popular basketball manga Slam Dunk ended in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump:

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Winners of the 32nd Kodansha Manga Award have been announced. Kodansha Manga Award is awarded annually to works published in the previous year by Kodansha. This year the winners are:

Children's manga category:
- Shugo Chara! (しゅごキャラ！) by PEACH-PIT [ Nakayoshi ]

Shounen manga category:
- Saikyo! Toritsu Aoizaka Koko Yakyubu (最強！ 都立あおい坂高校野球部) by Motoyuki Tanaka [ Weekly Shounen Sunday ]

Shoujo manga category:
- Kimi ni Todoke (君に届け) by Karuho Shiina [ Bessatsu Margaret ]

General manga category:
- Moyashimon (もやしもん) by Masayuki Ishikawa [ Evening ]

ANN points out that Kodansha's Morning 2 website has leaked news of the winner of the 2nd Morning International Manga Competition. According to the preview of the next issue of Morning 2, the winner is Fairy Tale by Taiwan's Meng-Lin Yu.

Deadline of the 3rd M.I.M.C. is September 30th, 2008.

Also, MangaCast has a "surprising" report on the latest issue of Morning 2.

A new manga from Felipe Smith, creator of Tokyopop's MBQ, will debut in Kodansha's Morning 2 vol.10, on sale June 21st. The new series will be the opening manga with 6 color pages, and will also be featured on the magazine's cover (it is quite rare that a new artist will do the cover of a manga magazine).

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.

Kodansha has recently opened a comic portal website called Kodansha Comic Plus (講談社コミックプラス).

Source: Ultimatum

According to a post from Negima mangaka Ken Akamatsu's blog, limited editions of volume 23 - 25 of the Negima manga will come bundled with the Negima OAV:

The anime will be by Shaft again and it'll be based on the manga version of Negima this time.

Source: Canned Dogs

Celebrating Shonen Sunday's and Shonen Magazine's 50th anniversary, Kodansha an Shogakukan are collaborating on a variety of special features.

In order to keep the English fans up-to-date on the special features and events, Rumic World has created a special page to keep track of everything that's coming out, as well as translations of the press conference and others.

According to Muhyojo, the latest issue of Kodansha's Morning revealed that the second volume of its Mandala magazine on March 21st. ANN has more:

Not only will this new 290-page volume be bigger (20 milimeters larger than A4 paper size, or roughly North American "Letter" size), but it will be in full color. 15 creators from eight countries contributed to this project, including 10 artists who returned from the first Mandala volume.

Also from ITmedia (via ANN) is the news that to celebrate the magazine's 50th anniversary, Konami will be making a game that will feature popular characters from Kodansha's Shonen Magazine and Shogakukan's Shonen Sunday.

Canned Dogs (via Muhyojo) has news of Kodansha's plans for celebrating Weekly Shounen Magazine's 50th anniversary:

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