Wow, just... wow

We knew that the novels had been licensed, but now with the official announcement, it appears BOTH manga were snapped up as well...

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(Los Angeles, October 31, 2005) – Fans have clamored for it for years, and now Seven Seas Entertainment is proud to announce it is finally bringing Kouhei Kadono’s seminal Boogiepop novels and manga to North American audiences in English for the very first time. Fans of the Boogiepop Phantom anime series from 2001 (as seen on G4 and The Anime Network) will finally be able to get the answers they have longed for while new readers will be drawn into the world of Boogiepop like never before.

“Our release of Boogiepop is going to make fans very happy,” says Adam Arnold, Senior Editor in charge of licensed manga. “I have deep roots in fandom and avidly follow what people say on message boards. We fans want everything to be left uncensored and want the work preserved the way the writers and artist originally intended. We expect translations to stay true to the source material, and most of all, we demand that publishers include any color pages that appeared in the original Japanese release. With that in mind, we’re going to give Boogiepop the respect that it deserves.”

With over 2 million books in print, Boogiepop first made headlines in 1997 when Kouhei Kadono’s Boogiepop and Others won first place in the Media Works-sponsored Dengeki Game Novel Contest. With the novel’s official release in February 1998, the book single-handedly ignited the “light novel” trend in Japanese literature.

Starting in February 2006, Seven Seas Entertainment plans to release the first of the Boogiepop novels in English. Further releases for 2006 include the second and third Boogiepop novels, both volumes of the Boogiepop Doesn’t Laugh manga series drawn by character designer Kouji Ogata and the two-volume Boogiepop Dual manga illustrated by Masayuki Takano (Blood Alone).

SEVEN SEAS BEGINS LICENSING FROM JAPAN

With the announcement of Boogiepop, Seven Seas Entertainment has jumped into the fray of Japanese licensing. This unique opportunity presented itself earlier this year when Japanese publishers began to take notice of the high quality of Seven Seas’ original titles.

“In this competitive marketplace, where big companies are flooding store shelves with whatever manga licenses they can get, entering the licensing fray at this late hour makes us something of an underdog,” explains company president Jason DeAngelis. “The best way for us to stand out from the pack is to focus on quality over quantity. We plan to give the works we license in from Japan the same sort of love of the medium and attention to quality as we have with our original properties.”

Together with it's new Head of Licensing Yayoi Ihne, a licensing expert who has worked at both Viz and Del Rey, Seven Seas is primed to cherry-pick only the finest titles. Expect more exciting announcements in 2006!

About Seven Seas Entertainment, LLC:

Seven Seas Entertainment is devoted to producing original entertainment properties. Established in 2004, the company has debuted its first four original manga titles -- Amazing Agent Luna, Blade for Barter, Last Hope and No Man's Land -- in early 2005, and has an impressive array of new manga lined-up including Aoi House, Captain Nemo, Destiny's Hand and Unearthly. Seven Seas launched its web site, www.gomanga.com, in October 2004, and has since become a daily stop for thousands of visitors eager to read manga online and contribute to an ever-growing forum community. In April 2005, Seven Seas became the first company to offer free downloadable manga for the Sony PSP and a month later, became the first company to release a theme song for its webmanga Aoi House and a flash anime short for No Man’s Land.
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I have never heard of Seven Seas Entertainment before. Anyone got any info on how good their quality is?