May 23, 2005
Gunslinger Girl vol. 2
So I went to B. Dalton's today and saw Gunslinger Girl volume 2 on the shelf. Finally! Finally! I'VE ONLY BEEN WAITING 2 YEARS! Goddammit when the hell did it come out? Leave it to ADV to make sure new releases never get any advertising. It doesn't even exist on their website. ADV's manga release calendar is equally useless(it hasn't been updated in 3 months). Why does such a great series get such poor treatment? Why is ADV in general so incompetent? While I am very happy about finally getting my hands on this book, I still have to complain.
ADV's translators have done a nice job on the book itself, but their publicity department, as always, has been horrible. There are already many reasons to hate ADV's publicity department, from their "What is anime" commercials to their pitifully barebones DVD releases (I need liner notes. Komugi would have been sooo much better if it was released by Bandai/Geneon) to their notoriously bad categorization of anime. The way they handled GSG's release only adds to the fire. Their site has absolutely no information on the book or the series or how many volumes. When they released volume 1, I had been expecting volume 2 to follow shortly. Nothing..so I assumed maybe they were taking their time for a quality release. 6 months later, I was worried ADV had dropped the project. They've done it in the past. But, ADV's website remained unchanged. They still listed book one and so I had hope. I kept that hope for two years. So what the hell was going on? Did they drop the series? Was there a licensing fight? Did book 2 come out? Whatever ADV knew, they didn't tell us. ADV, please learn to make a manga catalogue like Tokyopop which actually has useful information.
Thankfully, I am only a casual Gunslinger Girl fan so it hasn't affected me that much...but Yotsubato, that is another story. ADV, please do not do this to Yotsubato or I will do bad things to you..very bad things such as anonymously insult you on an internet blog.
Please? Please be good to Yotsuba.
Posted by Paranda at May 23, 2005 11:23 PM