Worlds Within Worlds...

It seems like all the news is at The Engine lately. This thread has produced some interesting things lately. The first of which is C.B. Cebulski's news of a new comics+manga anthology starting up:

There's currently a new comic/manga anthology in the planning stages actually. Ideally, it will include short stories from Japanese manga-ka, pro and amateur, as well as an international line-up of comic and OEL artists. All non-superhero, of course. The plan is for an English version to come out in America in late spring 06, with a Japanese version to follow soon thereafter. (Yes, a Japanese publisher is already onboard.) Both editions will hopefully include a survey card where readers can write in and rank their favorites. There will also be a website set up with an online summary card, as well as blogs and forums for the creators worldwide.

The working title we're using now is JETLAG, given that creators from around the world will be sending in their work.

We're still wortking out the final kinks and contracts, but several of the Japanese artists are already lined up and excited. I'll have more news on this soon to share here. Thanks for your patience and hopefully future support.

then Heidi asks:

Who's "WE"?

C.B. again:

"WE" at this point are me and the few crazy, more globally-minded creators that cooked up this scheme. It's been an exciting but maddening experience so far, with so may ideas coming out of it that focusing gets difficult at times. We were planning on 128 pages to start as a test, but now I think it's easily going to grow beyond that rather quickly. Oh, and quarterly for now. We'll see...

This sounds like it could be really cool. Anthologies seem notoriously difficult to start up here, but I hope it works out! The aspect of its possible printing in Japan is a different dimension from normal as well.