It’s been a quiet couple of weeks for manga fans on the new release front and this week is no exception. It is, at least, better than last week when there were no releases at all. This week has us dealing with just Kodansha Comics and that of Fairy Tail itself. And that really deserves its own bit of note here when you get down to it because it’s just damn impressive what they’ve done and what fans continue to do. Fairy Tail is one of those plugger manga series out there that keeps going and has a lot of material to work through as done by Hiro Mashima.
Kodansha Comics has been pushing through volumes hard and fast this year with a new volume each month. Now, you can’t do that with a lot of series as it taxes the publishers and really puts a strain on retailers that prefer the three to four month gap between volumes. But Kodansha Comics put a speed-up on the books begging in March 2013 to do this and have been putting out new books monthly since volume twenty four. Which was important, because the Japanese release date for volume twenty four was in December 2010. So they went from three years behind on a series that puts out new volumes in Japan every two months or so to being two months behind in North America.
The forty-sixth volume of the series arrived in Japan in November 2014 and Kodansha Comics has it lined up for release on January 27th, 2015. Now that’s a kick-ass publisher that fans can appreciate in getting a massive series caught up like that.
- Fairy Tail Vol. #45 (Kodansha Comics)
