After four straight weeks in the #1 spot, two blockbuster books finally pushed Bleach Volume 27 by Tite Kubo off the top of the heap of New York Times Graphic Books / Manga bestseller list. The two newcomers that duked it out for first? The lastest volume of Naruto and the final volume of Fruits Basket in what must have been a very tight race.

Naruto Volume 45 marks the last part of the big Naruto Generation Ninja accelerated release blast of the last few months. Now after this release, new volumes of Naruto will be out on its regular quarterly release schedule, with Volume 46 due in the stores in October.

While its no surprise that Naruto continues to rule the charts, it was a little surprising that the highly anticipated final volume of mega-popular shojo series Fruits Basket wasn't able to claim the top spot in the week of its debut. But this won't be the last you'll see of this volume -- Furuba fans will likely generate strong sales for this volume for weeks to come. You can also check out a free online preview of the first 21 pages of this fabulous finale.

Last weekend, over 44,000 fans came from places near and far to check out four days of fun at Anime Expo 2009 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Now that the party's over, what's left? How about a bunch of photos of the festivities? I give to you, better late than never, my Anime Expo 2009 Photo Gallery.

AX '09 welcomed a star-studded roster of guests, including Yun Kouga (creator of Loveless, and character designer for Gundam 00), Takashi Okazaki (creator of Afro Samurai) and Yasuhiro Nightow who gave fans a peek at a new trailer from the Trigun movie that's now in the works. There were exciting concerts from visual kei rockers Moi dix Mois and pop songbirds Morning Musume, and tons of awesome cosplay.

At their Friday afternoon panel at Anime Expo, the VIZ Media marketing bunch (a.k.a. Mark Chang and Candice Uyloan) kicked things off with a very big announcement for manga fans. Starting in January 2010, Shonen Jump Manga / VIZ Media will be speeding up releases of One Piece by Eiichiro Oda, similar to how they accelerated releases of Naruto recently to get the U.S. volumes closer to the most recently released volumes in Japan. Beginning January with volumes 24 through 28, 30 new volumes of One Piece will be released at a rate of five per month through June 2010, until they get up to volume 53. One Piece is currently up to Volume 54 in Japan.

Why do this? Well, possibly to give readers less reasons to rely on illegal scanlations to get their latest fix of this fantasy-pirate adventure series. As a series that’s featured in the U.S. edition of Shonen Jump magazine, One Piece was released much slower than other titles, because any given volume would only appear only after the stories in any given volume were serialized in VIZ’s boys manga monthly.

It's Day 4 of Anime Expo, and the costumed fans and American otaku who looked so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on Thursday are starting to show signs of con-fatigue (and maybe a hangover or two). But that won't stop them from heading back for another day of fun at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Southern California today.

The exhibits hall is open today from 10:00 am - 3:00 pm to fulfill your last-minute need to shop 'til you drop, and the same goes for Artists Alley and the Manga Cafe. There's also several panels featuring some of this weekend's top guests summing up their AX experiences. Read on, here's the short-list of things to do and see today: