If you're heavy into the purchasing of Japanese-borne erotica, then the ending of Icarus Publishing's Comic AG is truly a sad day. Ending with issue #110, Comic AG collected four different one-shots or ongoing stories each month -- the kinds of things you would see in Comic Hotmilk, Comic Masyo and other fine publications from Japan.

There are several reasons cited over at the IP blog, and they all make sense: their growth had stagnated and it took a lot of time and energy when their bread and butter were trade paperbacks. I'm really sad to see them drop this section off, because it was one of the rare times we'd see these one-shots published outside of an author's collected works.

Icarus still soldiers on with their slate of new releases, but the loss of Comic AG is going to be rather disappointing. I would love to see something like an Icarus Publishing annual -- a standard trade paperback-sized volume collecting some of the best one-shots that they wanted to release that year.

I know it's not necessarily easy to do, but consider that an item on my Christmas list, Simon.