Top Shelf to Publish Ax, New Alternative Manga Anthology

Ryan Sands, of Same Hat! Same Hat! blog fame, as well as intrepid editor and translator of Tokyo Zombie broke the news on Friday that Top Shelf will be publishing Ax, a leading alternative manga anthology from Japan in English. This is pretty exciting news for fans of indie comics and manga that is, well... edgier and more artistically innovative than your garden variety mainstream manga. Before this, the flow of alt-manga to American shores has been merely a few tantalizing tidbits here and there. This new edition of Ax should change this situation, dramatically.

Sean Michael Wilson, the co-editor for the English edition of Ax will be at Alternative Press Expo on Saturday, November 1 - Sunday, November 2, 2008 in San Francisco to give a talk about gekiga (dramatic pictures) on Sunday from 5 pm - 5:45 pm. He'll also be hanging out at the Top Shelf (#320, 321, 322) and Fanfare - Ponent Mon table #249 to hand out 16-page samplers of Ax to whet readers' appetites for this 400-page anthology magazine.

Look for more news to trickle out soon about this very cool addition to the American comics landscape, including release date, publishing frequency and the artistic line-up for this first issue.

Image credit: © Akino Kondoh