Yen Press rescues the funny

This doesn’t have to do with Yen Plus itself, but Yen Press announced something this weekend’s New York Comic-Con which made me very happy. Coincidentally, I recently finished re-reading my collection of Yotsuba&!, a Japanese comedy series about an excitable little girl trying to make sense of the new city she’s moved to, along with her adoptive single father and surprisingly accommodating next-door neighbors. It’s a work by Kiyohiko Azuma, perhaps better known for his quite good but not quite as funny earlier work, Azumanga Daioh, and I personally think it’s one of the funniest comics I’ve ever read - and I can attest that it maintains its humor even after a handful of re-readings. I finished the fifth volume of Yotsuba&!, the last one released before publisher ADV Manga imploded, and wished some other company would somehow pick up the series and release the other three volumes which have yet to be released to the English-speaking (er… -reading) world.

Well, you probably guessed by now that the announcement this weekend which made me so happy was that Yen Press has acquired rights to release the sixth volume of Yotsuba&! in September, with presumably the others to follow. Joy! That’s still a long ways off, but in the meantime, if you like to laugh, I suggest you start hunting down and picking up the five volumes that ADV has released so far in anticipation for the sixth this fall. ADV could probably use the money…