 | This article relies largely or entirely on a single source .(February 2010) |
Icarus Publishing is an American comic book publisher established in 2002. It specializes in localizing hentai manga for the English market.
A comic book or comicbook, also called comic magazine or simply comic, is a publication that consists of comics art in the form of sequential juxtaposed panels that represent individual scenes. Panels are often accompanied by descriptive prose and written narrative, usually, dialog contained in word balloons emblematic of the comics art form. Although comics has some origins in 18th century Japan, comic books were first popularized in the United States and the United Kingdom during the 1930s. The first modern comic book, Famous Funnies, was released in the U.S. in 1933 and was a reprinting of earlier newspaper humor comic strips, which had established many of the story-telling devices used in comics. The term comic book derives from American comic books once being a compilation of comic strips of a humorous tone; however, this practice was replaced by featuring stories of all genres, usually not humorous in tone.
Outside of Japan, hentai is anime and manga pornography. In the Japanese language, however, "hentai" is not a genre of media but any type of perverse or bizarre sexual desire or act. For example, outside of Japan a work depicting lesbian sex might be described as "yuri hentai", but in Japan it would just be described as "yuri".
Manga are comics or graphic novels created in Japan or by creators in the Japanese language, conforming to a style developed in Japan in the late 19th century. They have a long and complex pre-history in earlier Japanese art.
Contents
The publisher's first release was the anthology AG, which contained both original American comics and translated Japanese material. It later became focussed exclusively on Japanese manga. Trade paperback collections of the stories serialized in AG were printed from late 2004 onwards.
In book publishing, an anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler; it may be a collection of plays, poems, short stories, songs, and/or excerpts by different authors. In genre fiction, the term "anthology" typically categorizes collections of shorter works such as short stories and short novels, by different authors, each featuring unrelated casts of characters and settings, and usually collected into a single volume for publication.
In comics, a trade paperback is a collection of stories originally published in comic books, reprinted in book format, usually presenting either a complete miniseries, a story arc from a single title, or a series of stories with an arc or common theme.
Icarus Publishing started releasing AG on BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing network in December 2007, [1] [2] and AG Digital through DriveThruComics on 24 October 2008. [3] AG was the longest running manga anthology in North America [4] and ceased publication at issue 110. [5] AG Digital was at first supposed to be continued online through direct and BitTorrent download. [6]
As of May 2012 there have been no new releases since early 2010. While company website and blog are still available, the webshop has since been closed down. According to several reports the owner of Icarus Publishing, Simon Jones, has fallen severely ill, and operations are completely halted for the time being. [7] There has been no official statement.
