BL fans who were looking forward to TOKYOPOP’s BL line BLU releasing translated versions of Natsuki Matsuoka’s Flesh&Blood novels, illustrated by Kaoru Yukifuna, are unfortunately going to be disappointed: BLU’s “Shonen-Ai-Samurai” has posted on the BLU forums to say that the novels have been postponed indefinitely. You’ll have to be registered and logged in at the BLU forums to have that link work, btw, but here’s what was said about the F&B novels:

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’re going to release these at this time. It’s just too expensive to do novels and many companies have been burned trying to release them. Sorry for the bad news.

I dunno, DMP seems to be doing reasonably well with the novels– they keep licensing them and churning them out, anyway. Clear Skies just came out this month, and the fourth Ai no Kusabi volume is due out in November.

But of course, DMP is pretty much the only one doing BL light novels, and there aren’t all that many companies doing non-BL ones either. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how it turns out!

Earlier I expressed surprise at the reported cancellation of the popular yaoi manga series Love Mode (pictured) and Gakuen Heaven, and now that the jig is up, BLU editor “Shonen-Ai-Samurai” offers up this comment on the BLU forums:

Right now, these are postponed. Please support Love Mode 10 when it comes out in August. If it sells as well as volume 9 or better, it will be very difficult for us to not do volume 11.

In other words, neither Love Mode nor Gakuen Heaven is cancelled outright, just postponed– and so, potentially, are all the titles mentioned earlier, even the ones that are regular TOKYOPOP and not BLU.

So, ICv2 reported that they’ve “confirmed” that TOKYOPOP’s Blu imprint is bumping its price up from $9.95 to $12.95, starting in 2008. As a result, everyone ELSE reported it as being “confirmed” as well.

But no one mentions the original report came from a Blu editor on the official Blu forums on October 10th. It was then posted by YaoiSuki on the 17th, and that’s where a good batch of news sites picked it up from.

Hmph!

Otaku Champloo has declared today to be Yaoi no Hi (Yaoi Day), because it’s 8/01, and on Japanese cell phones 8=ya, 0=O, 1=I, blah blah blah 801 Media blah blah.

Anyway. To celebrate, Champloo notes Tonari no 801-chan, but I’m going to point instead to an article by a BRILLIANT authoress on theOtaku: the Takumi-kun series is getting a live-action movie. I don’t know much about the manga besides that it’s about a bunch of pretty boys at an isolated private school, and that BLU has the license but hasn’t released it yet.

TOKYOPOP (see liveblog thread) did make a few new announcements at SDCC, mostly non-Japanese series. Here ya go: