It looks like you all dug our little message about “out of print” books, and we’re glad. We always try to level with you about the realities of publishing great books, and that means sometimes we have to talk about the problems we encounter.

So that said, let’s talk about late books.

UDON has never been the most ‘timely’ of publishers, though we’ve always been one of the hardest working ones publishing and we’ve been here for 11 years! We’ve made great strides over the past couple of years, but still, lateness is a problem and it’s one that we take seriously. Recently things had slipped pretty badly with our scheduling, and so we wanted to take a second to explain why sometimes a book is late, and what we’re going to do about it. Out of respect for all parties we can’t talk about individual projects, but just general reasons why a project might miss its release date.

Why Books Are Late

Production: All books are not created equal, and sometimes when we allocate a certain amount of time to translate, do layout, or create a book, it ends up taking far longer than anticipated. Sometimes translating from Japanese is far more difficult than expected with lots of game-specific terminology that we have to get just right. Sometimes it takes one of the guys longer to draw an amazing splash page than they thought, but the results kick-ass! Sometimes a disk gets corrupted and we have to wait a little while for a replacement. We’ve been in the business for 10 years, butevery single month something crazy will come out of the woodwork to surprise us—that’s what makes publishing these great books so interesting!

Approvals: The various companies that we work with want these books to be as awesome as we do, and so sometimes it takes a little longer to go over the finer points so that everyone’s happy with the final product.

Printing/Shipping/Customs: We print our art books overseas—it’s what lets us bring you printing quality as good as the Japanese editions of the same book, and for a reasonable price. But that means that printing, shipping, and clearing customs can take a really long time. Again, we try to compensate for all of these factors we solicit the books and say they’re gonna be out, but a delay at customs, a delay in shipping, a delay in printing, all of those are out of our hands and we’ve recently had some pretty bad luck on that front.

We Have To Solicit Up To Six Months In Advance: Everything can be going along great in November, and so we tell our distribution partners to expect a book in May, and then the next week everything goes nuts! Once a solicitation is out there it’s pretty tough to take it back for a bunch of reasons, and so instead we try to adjust the shipping dates to be as accurate as possible. Some projects… take more adjustments than others.

Quality: This is the biggest one, and it’s reflected in all of the other things that cause a delay. We feel that we release some of the best licensed books in English, and all of our feedback from you guys suggests you feel the same way. We care about making the books great, about translating every bit of text, about trying to make our editions as awesome as the originals. We want our art to be cool, our translations to be accurate, and we want you guys to be happy… and sometimes, honestly, that means that delaying the books to make them better.

What does all of this add up to? Well, some pretty understandable frustration on your part. We’re a crew of folks working every day to make these books their best, but even that doesn’t count for much when you’ve got a preorder in with your favourite store and you see the dates pushed back… AGAIN. It sucks for you, it SUCKS for us, and we’re going to try and fix it.

Here’s What We’re Going To Do

We have come to the decision that we should hold off soliciting books until they’re ready to print. This means that when a book shows up in the Diamond catalog, it will be finished production, approved, and at the printers.

We’re not going to announce things until production has already begun. This means there will be a much shorter wait between project announcements and when our books are on store shelves. Not TOO short of course, we still want you guys super-excited for what we’re working on…!

We’re going to keep a list of our solicited projects on our website, up to date. It can sometimes take weeks or months for our release date changes to make their way across all of our distribution partners. We’re going to make the UDON Blog the most accurate source for upcoming release dates.

We’re going to take a few months off soliciting books to catch up. All of these plans are going into effect starting this summer, and as of right now we’re going to take a few months off of soliciting projects until we’re caught up on our current slate. There are still going to be UDON books hitting stores everywhere regularly for the next six months, but those will be our already announced projects… and if you do see new projects announced for July or August, you can be sure that we’re ready to publish them.

This won’t completely eliminate lateness—as I mentioned there are still shipping problems, customs problems, and who-knows-what-else that we haven’t considered yet. But we feel it’s the best way to get you the books that you love, and to make sure you all stay UDON fans.

THANKS FOR BEING AN UDON FAN!

Sincerely,

The Staff of UDON

All titles link to full product information pages with graphics, synopsis, and more information.

Recently Released:

Apple Selection Volume 1: Summer

Shigenori Soejima Artworks

Street Fighter IV & Super Street Fighter IV: Official Complete Works

April:

Darkstalkers: The Ultimate Edition
Projected Release Date: April 11^th, 2012

Mega Man: Robot Master Field Guide
Projected Release Date: April 11^th, 2012

Pixiv Almanac
Projected Release Date: April 11^th, 2012

Omar Dogan’s Girl Seven
Projected Release Date: April 11th, 2012

May:

Makeshift Miracle Book 1: The Girl From Nowhere
Projected Release Date: May 8^th, 2012

Apple Selection Volume 2: Autumn
Projected Release Date: May 2012

Sengoku Basara: Samurai Legends Volume 1 (Manga)
Projected Release Date:  May 2012

Captain Commando Volume 1 (Manga)
Projected Release Date: Late May 2012

Valkyria Chronicles 2: World Artworks
Projected Release Date: Late May 2012

June:

Persona 3: Official Design Works
Projected Release Date: Early June

Sengoku Basara Samurai Heroes: Official Complete Works
Projected Release Date: June 2012

Shining Force Feather: Design Works
Projected Release Date: June 2012

Toxic Volume 1
Projected Release Date: Early June 2012

July:

Persona 4: Official Design Works
Projected Release Date: July 2012

Announced Projects, Release Date To Be Announced:

The Eyes of Bayonetta: Art Book & DVD

Street Fighter: AKUMA Graphic Novel

Where to find UDON Comics, Manga, and Books?

UDON is distributed by Diamond Comics Distributors and Diamond Book Distributors, and their work is available from better comic and book stores around the world.

To find a comic book store in your area, visit the Comic Shop Locator Service at http://comicshoplocator.com/.

UDON Books also available at Amazon.com - Barnes & Noble - Book Depository - ChaptersIndigo.ca - Waterstones and many other fine retailers.

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At conventions we get asked about APPLE, the Korean full-colour anthology series featuring an array of top concept artists working in animation, manwha, CG, and design all the time. It’s easy to see why: It’s an awesome series with gorgeous illustration and thrilling stories.

Well now, the creators of the Apple anthology are back with an all-new collection of gorgeous concept and pinup artwork! Apple Selection: Summer features dozens of Korea’s top illustrators creating brand-new pin-up work of cute summer girls, seductive nurses, jamming punk rockettes, and more.

A collection of more three dozen artists, Apple Selection: Summer is broken into three sections, “Last Summer,” “Punk,” and “Healer,” and each features an array of original illustrations and concept art revolving around those themes. Styles range from super cute to super intense to smokin’ hot!

Whether you’re an art fan or an illustrator yourself, you won’t want to miss the amazing range of illustrations on display in Apple Selection: Summer. Check out a 5 page preview of this volume below!

Fans can look for a second thrilling collection of concept and pinup art, Apple Selection Volume 2: Autumn in a few months. If you’re one of the folks who misses the great stories alongside the great art, later this summer we’ll be releasing Toxic Volume 1, a new full colour comics anthology from the creators of Apple! Look for details on the UDON site coming soon!

Click through to the teaser website, Facebook page or Twitter.

EONS ago, in a time when glorious rivers of quarters flowed from pizza parlors aplenty, the great arcade characters of old ruled the universe. But as the times changed with the rise of the cartridge, the disc, and finally telepathy, and the people stopped paying lifeblood tribute of sweat and metal, all but a handful of these characters were forgotten, many thought lost the ages. ShiftyLook, through the unlimited power of the web, exists to excavate the buried treasures of the NAMCO BANDAI Group, bringing back to life characters once thought consigned to a lonely oblivion.

Presenting UDON Taskmaster – now available as part of the Weapon Expert downloadable costume pack for Ultimate Marvel VS Capcom 3!

This version of the mercenary master of all weapons was created for the 2002 Taskmaster 4-issue mini-series UDON produced for Marvel Comics. He also appeared as a supporting character in the  Agent X & Deapool series, which teamed up UDON with superstar writer Gail Simone.

The Weapon Expert pack also includes new costumes for:

Trish – “Gloria” alt costume
Hawkeye – “Ronin” alt costume
Zero – “X” alt costume (hotly anticipated by Mega Man fans!) 

And if you haven’t already picked up this great Capcom game:

Order ULTIMATE MARVEL VS CAPCOM 3 for Xbox 360

Order ULTIMATE MARVEL VS CAPCOM 3 for Playstation 3 

Hey Udon fans!

Thanks so much for your continued support and enthusiasm for all our comics, manga, and artbooks! We get tons of feedback from you guys and gals online and at conventions,  and we hear all of it. We may not always have time to respond–and some stuff is still under wraps and so we CAN’T respond–but rest assured that we’re listening and always doing our best for you, whether you’ve just discovered us through our just-published Shigenori Soejima Artworks or Apple Selection Volume 1 art books, or you’ve been with us right from The Beginning with Street Fighter #1.

So let’s talk about “Out Of Print” books. We’ve been getting a lot of e-mail lately about books that have gone “Out of Print,” but are really just no longer easily available.

Sometimes there’s a gap between when we sell through the copies of a book we have printed, and when we print more copies. Sometimes this is only a week, and sometimes it’s 6 months or more. This is true for art books, manga, or our graphic novels. We print all of our books to have stock on hand for at least a year from their publication date, and sometimes for much longer. There is a long, long window of easy availability on our books, and we work hard to reprint books all the time. Sometimes you might have to wait a little while for that reprint, and we generally can’t tell you when that’s going to be until it’s (almost) already here, but except for our very cool, very deliberately limited edition books (and we always let you know about those ahead of time) most of our artbooks are still easily available from us, whether they were published last week or 4 years ago.

For the ones that aren’t easily available, well, here’s where a lot of you guys get upset. Independent sellers will always sell our stuff for whatever they want, but generally when a book is no longer easily available–even for a week–they’ll raise the price on their copies, sometimes outrageously. Obviously, we have absolutely no control over this, but it happens and there’s not much to be done and it’s not worth worrying about, here’s why:

There are thousands of copies of these books already in print. Sometimes tens of thousands of copies! Just because we don’t have any in our warehouse, that doesn’t mean that the copies in comic book stores, major book chains, or other online avenues have immediately disappeared! With a little googling this evening I was able to find copies of some of those “Out of print” books fetching outrageous sums – and they were still on sale for less than cover price!

So if you want to find an “Out of Print” book, here’s what we recommend:

1. Check out our webstore, http://udonstore.com. It’s FULL of “out-of-print” stuff!
2. Check the shelves of your local comic book shop. Comics stores order lots of our books, and there are likely copies available there. To find the comic book shop in your area, call 1-888-COMIC-BOOK or visit http://comicshoplocator.com/. Maybe don’t mention that it’s ‘out of print’ though, just in case.
3. If you’re visiting certain popular online booksellers and coming up empty, why not check bookstores in other countries? Amazon.ca (Canada) and Chapters.Indigo.ca (Canada) stock our books, and they often have copies available for cover price or less!
4. Visit us at conventions! We sometimes have rare or “out of print” books at our convention appearances.
5. Wait for a reprint. It only seems like waiting is terrible, but it totally builds character!

 
So to repeat: All of our books have thousands and thousands of copies in print, with the exception of clearly-marked, limited edition stuff (and if you’ve been hmming and hahing on our awesome Street Fighter Ultimate Box Set, well, you might want to hurry up…). While a book might no longer be EASILY available from your preferred online retailer, our books are still out there and not too hard to find with a little bit of searching. Good luck!

Again, we thank you all for your continued support and enthusiasm, and for reading this really long blog post! You guys rock.

Sincerely,

- The Staff of UDON

PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR

Check out more of his amazing work in the upcoming Girls Seven art book!

Mega Man fans Rejoice! The news that you’ve been waiting for is here, as Mega Man Official Complete Works is now back in print. We realize this book is going for some pretty crazy prices right now, and we’re just as happy as you are that there are now copies available for purchase at cover price.

We’ve also just reprinted Mega Man Zero Official Complete Works and Okami Official Complete Works.

All three books are currently available at Diamond for immediate reorder, if you’re a comic book retailer. Which means that as a customer, you can go ahead and special request this from any comic book store, and they can reorder it for you! You can find the comic book store nearest to you by visiting http://comicshoplocator.com/.

Copies of all of these books should make their way to Amazon, Barnes and Noble online, and other booksellers over the next 2 to 3 weeks. In the interim, here are the ordering codes for these books.

Mega Man Official Complete Works
Diamond Code: JUL091090
ISBN-13/EAN: 978189737679953999

Mega Man Zero Official Complete Works
Diamond Code: FEB073817
ISBN-13/EAN: 978189737601053499

Okami Official Complete Works
Diamond Code: MAY073783
ISBN-13/EAN: 978189737602753999

UDON: Mega Man Gigamix has just finished publishing in North America with the release of volume 3. How long ago did you complete your work on Gigamix?

ARIGA: I finished the last page around the time of the Toronto ComicCon last year, which was in August, I think.

So you finished Gigamix and then got right on a plane to come to Toronto, Canada for the first time?

Basically right away, yes.

How did you feel about completing the story? Because it’s an epic story… were you glad it was finished or were you sad it was over?

I first started the story about ten years ago, so I kind of felt relieved that I finally got all the way to this point, to be finished. I actually came up with the finale of the book back in ’98, so more than 10 years ago.

When I was working on the book there were times when production on the videogame would pause, and then it would start up again. For instance, there was a long period of time between Rockman 8 and Rockman 9. So the publisher said, ‘because the game is not coming out, we don’t really need to make a new manga.’ Also, the magazine that was originally publishing my manga stopped carrying Megaman all together, so that was another delay.

What was your favourite part of the Gigamix story?

My favourite part is where the Earth robots fought the space robots. Wily and Light, they are basically enemies. But when a bigger enemy showed up, they had to join forces and fight together to defeat it. It’s a very difficult nuance, to explain the relationship between Lightand Wily, the ties that bind them together.

Like Magneto and Professor X? They were friends and now they’re on opposite sides but they still have that dynamic of friendship, that respect and understanding, in their relationship.

Something like that. Wily and Light, they’re friends but then they’re enemies, and yet even as enemies, there’s a way in which they’re sort of friends.

What new projects are you working on right now?

At this moment, I am working on a couple things that I can’t really mention, unfortunately. I’ve also been helping on some game work. I am looking forward to doing more Mega Man stuff, but there is nothing that has been announced yet. And of course, it is important to me that Gigamix has reached a North American audience at last.

Do you have a message that you’d like to send to your North American fans?

When I was working on Megamix, I was thinking to myself, ‘wouldn’t it be great if we could release an English version?’ Since Rockman and Mega Man are popular in North America, I kept thinking it would be really great if this manga could be released so those fans could read it

In fact, the reason why I titled the book Megamix was because of the “Mega”, since I had the American Mega Man in mind. Originally the book was supposed to be called Rockman Remix, but since I had that North American Mega Man in mind, I went ahead with using Mega in the title instead. So I am extremely, extremely happy that I was able to get it delivered to the fans in North America.

Hitoshi Ariga poses with the UDON editions of the Mega Man Gigamix Manga, at Denny's in Ikebukuro!

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UDON has released Mega Man Megamix volumes 1-3 and Mega Man Gigamix volumes 1-3 in English in North America. Gigamix 1-3 are currently available, and new printings of Megamix 1-3 will be available in February/March. Our thanks to Hitoshi Ariga for agreeing to the interview, Steven Cummings for translation, and Shaindle Minuk for transcribing.