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By Gia Manry

I can't believe 2008 is only just half-over-- it feels like it's been such a long year already! (Maybe it's because I've spent so much of it traveling to cons?...) But there's still half a year to go, so here's a catch-up with the biggest manga and anime companies in North America-- and what to expect from them for the rest of the year. Don't worry: if they haven't made announcements, I'll just speculate wildly!

ADV
What Happened: A.D. Vision has been having a tough year. After announcing one of the most highly-anticipated titles for 2008 at Anime Expo last year, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, they lost the license to Bandai Entertainment Inc. for unreported reasons (rumors and speculation point at a lack of funds). Back in February they transformed Newtype USA into PiQ, which shut down only four issues later. Their website has suffered from mysterious outages, few DVDs have been released, and finally, some thirty titles licensed via the Japanese company Sojitz were re-awarded to competitor FUNimation at Anime Expo.

What's Coming: At Expo, ADV announced that they had a replacement for Sojitz already, and were in the process of negotiating as many as 23 new licenses. Other than that, the company seems to be favoring sitting back and selling things that they have on hand, so I'd guess that they're trying to collect money so produce the series they already have licensed. I'd be surprised to see any new announcements from them, but predictions of their demise seem a bit premature at this point. Interestingly, their most-requested title appears to be not an anime but a manga: Yotsuba&!, by the creator of Azumanga Daioh. They seem sick of not being able to answer questions about a release date for volume 6, so if they can put together the money to release it, they may placate fans and profit enough to work on putting the rest of their manga catalogue back on track. As for the anime? Only time will tell…

Gia Manry is a long-time anime fan and a professional journalist. She currently writes anime news at giapet.net, but has a big project up her sleeve…