Project-H kickstarter for Vanilla Essence by Yamatogawa

The higher tiers seem crazy to me. I already have a shiki and several posters (one personalized, because I requested that the signature be near the palm tree and he decided to have fun with it) and books signed by Yamatogawa thanks to their Hentai festival at Anime Expo. Maybe I should sell them if people are willing to lay out that much cash!

Fakku has hands down the best quality translated manga, period. The only better material I've seen (and have) is the Dark Horse Ghost in the Shell releases, and those are pretty old. Eros Comix and Icarus Publishing come close, but they're dead.

It was only to check out the subscription model that I came back to Fakku (and to buy Cuvie and Gunma works). I checked it out for about a month back in 2008, a few months after it launched, and found it slick but unimpressive; a pain to download and I didn't like the overdone online browsing. All the features were painfully limited, from the limited diversity of tags to ridiculous restrictions like 10 favorites or the disabled collections feature. I don't regret moving on to g.e-hentai in the least, because it had all of those features functional and useful, and Fakku has really only fixed most of them in the last few months.

This would probably look better if I had turned on the other light (or a decent camera), but here you go. He was signing them on the bottom, as you'd expect, but I figured the area around the palm trees was less visually busy, and he decided to utilize the Matenger in the tree. I forget what he's saying.

I don't think that would be a good idea. Fakku is still too small, for one, and Project-H is an imprint of Digital Manga Publishing. Second, there's room enough for two Hentai publishers in the world.

At any rate, this is awesome: more Yamatogawa is always flat-out kickass news. The guy hasn't laid an egg yet: all of his books are classics. What worries me is that PH went with the Kickstarter route with this book.

Digital Manga Publishing has had a string of really weird Kickstarters for some of the Tezuka books, and some of them were really weird: we're talking $250K for some of Tezuka's lesser-known books. Now, we're seeing them Kickstart a Yamatogawa book. Seeing as how big Witchcraft, Boing Boing and Power Play were, I have to wonder why they went this route. It makes me worry that DMP is in trouble. :(




You'll forgive me for going on a tangent, but I'm really passionate about this subject: the old Dark Horse GitS release was made masterful by one man, the late, great Toren Smith. He's one of the most important figures in US Manga publishing history, having been roommates with the original founders of Studio Gainax and being the guy who personally backed Ah My Goddess' release in the U.S. His publishing company, Studio Proteus, was responsible for a lot of classic manga in the U.S. (Caravan Kidd, Outlanders, Exxaxion, Gunsmithcats), and they also had a porn imprint. Classics like Slut Girl, Silky Whip and Sextra Credit were translated and released in the U.S. courtesy of Smith--and the man was super-finicky about his translations, so those scripts are timeless.

Sorry again about the tangent, I just really love Toren Smith's work. Man really had an eye for quality. RIP.