Coming hot on the heels of the recently-released Super Exciting Guide – Story Volume is the Character Volume, set for release from Shueisha 03 April 2009 in Japan. Stay tuned for more details as they come in.

We have been following these manga delays for a while, so it is no real surprise to see that a couple of the upcoming omnibus “Viz Big” editions for the “DBZ” portion of the manga have been delayed… again. DBZ #4 (covering tankōbon 26-28) has been pushed back from 21 April 2009 to 23 June 2009, while DBZ #5 (covering tankōbon 29-31) has been pushed back from 21 July 2009 to 20 October 2009 according to their Amazon listings.

Our buddy Greg popped over to our forum with a couple quick bits from the new Dragon Ball: Super Exciting Guide – Story Volume guide book that came out this week in Japan. Greg notes that while most of the material is information we have seen packaged and repackaged many times before, there are a couple new bits by way of a new interview with Toriyama. In it, the author notes that in discussing how to make Goku stronger with his assistant Matsuyama, by making Goku’s hair “blonde” (or “gold” or “yellow” or however you would like to describe it), it actually made it easier on them since they would no longer have to color in all of Goku’s hair, which took a long time to dry. Toriyama also lists out his five favorite battles (#1 was Goku vs Piccolo-Daimaō), and a few other nice little tidbits.

“Rule”, Ayumi Hamasaki’s latest CD single (and the theme song for Dragon Ball Evolution), is apparently not selling so well for Hamasaki… comparatively speaking, anyway. According to Oricon, while “Rule” is Hamasaki’s 20th #1 single in a row (and her 32nd #1 single in total), it sold “barely” over 95,000 copies, and is the lowest first-week sales ever in her career.

We were planning on reviewing the song (along with its complete CD+DVD single package) on the upcoming podcast this weekend, but since it has (shockingly) not yet arrived, we will be discussing some other current news with a few familiar voices — stay tuned for that review in the near future, though!

CDJapan is having a special sale to tie-in with the Japanese release of Dragon Ball Evolution this month. They are offering up to 20% off most Dragon Ball-related DVDs (though some are only, for example, 10% off). If you have any holes in your R2 collection, this may be another great chance to fill them in. Be sure to compare with other online retailers, though, since Amazon Japan occasionally has better deals on certain volumes. For example, the first Dragon Ball movie (which many American fans are still struggling to get an uncensored version of due to the ongoing Lion’s Gate licensing fiasco/confusion) is on sale for ¥2520 on CDJapan, while it is going for ¥2175 over on Amazon Japan. Make sure you balance out prices with shipping costs, as well.

Toshio Furukawa (the voice of Piccolo) updated his blog yesterday to say that they were recording lines for the first episode of Dragon Ball Kai, while Naotoshi Shida (keyframe animator for Dragon Ball Z) also had a blog update noting that they finished up the keyframe animation for the new ending theme to the series.

It sounds like everything is starting to come together for its 05 April 2009 debut on Fuji TV in Japan!

We have some final confirmation about the most recent guide, Dragon Ball: Super Exciting Guide – Story Volume, which was released today in Japan. It appears our original guess was correct, and it will indeed be a manga-specific guide. Here’s the book description from Shueisha’s site:

世界的名作コミックの見どころを徹底ガイド！

友情　悟空と仲間たちの感動エピソードを徹底追跡！
努力　鳥山明先生監修の修行データで、孫悟空の成長を完全解析！
勝利　強敵たちとの熱きバトルを、孫悟空の想いとともに大紹介！

A complete guide to the highlights of the world-famous comic masterpiece!

Friendship – It thoroughly tracks Goku and friends’ exciting episodes!
Effort – Through the training data supervised by Akira Toriyama-sensei, Son Goku’s growth is completely analyzed!
Victory – The blazing battles with strong opponents are profiled, together with Son Goku’s thoughts!

They were even nice enough to post a couple preview pages from the new guide. You can check out the rest of the pages (10 total) on Shueisha’s manga site.

Back in December we first told you about the “Chapter Books” coming out under the Viz Kids label. Courtesy of Amazon (by way of our buddy Tanooki Kuribo), we have cover art for the first four announced volumes:

While I am sure that very few of us are genuinely interested in the contents of these books (like we say with the “animanga”: if you want to read the story, why not just read the original manga as the author originally drew/wrote it…?), the cover art nevertheless leaves us intrigued. The art comes from sources like various chapter title pages, but some things are swapped around and re-colored. Quite honestly, they are rather nice looking! Volumes 1 & 2 are due out 04 August 2009, while volumes 3 & 4 are due out 01 September 2009.