Despite its name, Digital Manga Inc. has always had a robust line of print manga, skewing heavily toward yaoi and boys-love titles, so the company's announcement late last year that it would be placing a number of print manga on hiatus sent shivers up fans' spines; that sort of announcement is often a prelude to more dire news.

Not this time, though. Not only is Digital resuming print publication, it has moved some of its titles up and is making them available earlier than originally planned. Yoko Tanigaki, Digital's vice president, sales and distribution, confirmed the publisher is resuming print publication, and none of its print manga series have been canceled. And there's more: Three titles that were slated for publication later this year are either available now or will be available next week via Digital's retail site, Akadot.com (note: link may be NSFW). Vol. 8 of Ai no Kusabi, scheduled for an October release, is available now, and Vol. 7 of Ze, originally set for September, will be there next week. And there's more: Vol. 8 of The Tyrant Falls in Love will also be available next week, well ahead of its July release date, and it will come with a special postcard for Akadot buyers only. In an e-mail, Tanigaki said:

These 3 titles were brought back from our print-hiatus early as a "Limited Early Bird Special Releases."

By limited, I mean, the quantity - we are selling 300 copies on akadot.com and additional 200 copies at AX booth (July 4th weekend) .. we just wanted to please our fans. That's all.

Moving forward, Tanigaki estimates DMI will publish two manga per month in print (it has a large digital-only selection as well). That is in addition to the Tezuka titles (Unico, Atomcat) the company funded via Kickstarter and published earlier this year, and the new volume of Vampire Hunter D that came out this month; only the yaoi titles were on print hiatus.

There was more good news for Digital-watchers at this past weekend's Fanime con; at their panel, Digital staff announced three new boys love titles, confirmed that they would publish the eighth and final volume of Vampire Hunter D and stated that Yaoi-Con, which was cancelled this year, will definitely take place next year.