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Viz Adds Saturn Apartments, Kingyo Used Books Manga (Updated)

The North American manga publisher Viz Media has announced that it will publish four more titles from Shogakukan's Monthly Ikki alternative manga magazine, after first previewing them for free on its newly launched Sigikki website:

Saturn Apartments (Dosei Mansion)
Hisae Iwaoka
July 23, 2009 (on Sigikki website)
Publisher's description: "A touching, character-rich vision of an intriguing new world.

"Far in the future, humankind has evacuated the Earth in order to preserve it. Humans now reside in a gigantic structure that forms a ring around the Earth, thirty-five kilometers up in the sky. The society of the ring is highly stratified: the higher the floor, the greater the status. Mitsu, the lowly son of a window washer, has just graduated junior high. When his father disappears and is assumed dead, Mitsu must take on his father's occupation. As he struggles with the transition to working life, Mitsu's job treats him to an outsider's view into the various living-room dioramas of the Saturn Apartments."

This science-fiction manga is being adapted into a live-action film.




Kingyo Used Books (Kingyoya Koshoten)
Seimu Yoshizaki
July 30, 2009 (on Sigikki website)
Publisher's description: "This manga bookstore has a thousand stories to tell.

"A businessman discovers how his childhood memories can brighten his day. An art student finds inspiration. An archer hits a surprising bull's eye. A housewife rediscovers romance. A teenager discovers his true self in the pages of a manga magazine. Welcome to Kingyo Used Books, a place where people find their dreams in manga…"




Afterschool Charisma (Hōkago no Charisma)
Kumiko Suekane
July 30, 2009 (on Sigikki website)
Publisher's description: "History repeats itself... Or does it?

"St. Kleio Academy is a very exclusive school: all of the students are clones of famous historical figures such as Beethoven, Queen Elizabeth I, Napoleon, Mozart, and Freud. All of them, that is, except for Shiro Kamiya. As Shiro struggles to adapt to this unusual campus, St. Kleio's first graduate, a clone of John F. Kennedy, is killed. Are the clones doomed to repeat the fate of their genetic progenitors, or can they create their own destinies? And how does a normal boy like Shiro fit in?"




Tokyo Flow Chart
Eiji Miruno
July 30, 2009 (on Sigikki website)
Publisher's description: "This manga will f(low) with your brain!

"Have you ever wished that somebody else would just DO SOMETHING about the chaos in your life? Then this is the perfect manga for a slacker like you! Tokyo Flow Chart is (probably) the world's first four-frame comic strip in flow chart format. It breaks down the complexities of life and aids in the mastery of brain skills such as flow-chart-manga comprehension or mental bullet-dodging. As Confusious say: 'Let your brain flow with the chart!'"


Viz Media had revealed in May that it is serializing Daisuke Igarashi's Children of the Sea on the Sigikki website already, followed by Mohiro Kitoh's Bokurano: Ours, Q Hayashida's Dorohedoro, and Shunju Aono's I'll Give It My All... Tomorrow on July 23. It will also serialize Natsume Ono's House of Five Leaves on the website on July 30. Monthly Ikki editor Hideki Egami will travel from Japan to San Diego's Comic-Con International for Viz Media's Ikki panel on July 25.

Update 2: The Sigikki website's copyright notice list the above titles and Puncho Kondoh's Bob to Yukaina Nakamatachi, Temari Tamura's Kameodoru, Tondabayashi's Kotae Wa Mittsu, and Natsume Ono's Not Simple. Viz's release of Not Simple has already been revealed, but Viz Media has not announced plans for the other titles yet. Thanks, The Mad Manga Massacre.