More from Mashima:  Hiro Mashima’s Fairy Tail ended a few months ago, and he hinted last year that he was thinking about a new series (see "Yuri, Yaoi, and Magical Girls Gone Bad").  Now the U.S.-based Kodansha Comics has released some preliminary sketches from the as-yet-unnamed new manga.  The new series will launch in Japan on June 27, and it’s likely that if Kodansha is promoting it this vigorously, they have plans to publish it in North America as well.

Quick Notes from Japan:  The Maid-Sama! series will get a new volume—five years after it ended.  Anime News Network reports that creator Hiro Fujiwara announced in the latest issue of LaLa magazine that a new volume is in the works; no word yet on whether American publisher VIZ Media will pick it up.

A new anti-piracy initiative has hit a snag, according to The Japan Times: NTT Communications Corp. announced on Monday that at the government’s request it would block access to three websites that link to bootleg manga sites.  On Thursday, Yuichi Nakazawa, a lawyer who uses the NTT internet service, filed a lawsuit saying that NTT’s plan would violate the constitutional right to privacy of communications.

And Crunchyroll reports that the sci-fi series Terra Formars will return to Weekly Young Jump after a hiatus of over a year due to writer Yu Sasuga’s health.  The 21st volume is scheduled for publication in Japan in August.  VIZ published volume 20 in January of this year.

Dark Horse Comics Licenses Two Series:  Dark Horse announced that it will publish the sequel to Spike Chunsoft’s Danganronpa: The Animation and a spinoff of Hiroya Oku’s Gantz.

The original Danganronpa followed a group of students who were accepted into an elite school, only to find themselves locked into a murder mystery with deadly consequences, overseen by a homicidal panda. Danganronpa 2: Ultimate Luck and Hope and Despair, by Kyousuke Suga (Persona 5: Comic à la Carte), is a three-volume series that features a new group of students, this time on a school trip to the tropics; and again, the panda appears to pit them against one another.  Both are based on the Danganronpa video games developed by Spike Chunsoft.  The first volume of Danganronpa 2 is scheduled to go on sale in September with an MSRP of $12.99.

Gantz G is a three-volume spinoff of Gantz, which ran for 37 volumes.  In Gantz G, which is written by Oku and illustrated by Keita Iizuka, a group of teenagers who were killed in a bus accident are returned to consciousness, outfitted with weapons and uniforms, and dispatched to hunt and kill aliens.  Like the original Gantz, this story is for mature readers and will be shrink-wrapped; the first volume of the three-volume series will be out in June and has an MSRP of $13.99.

Seven Seas Entertainment Lands Tomo-Chan:  On a lighter note, Seven Seas has licensed the high-school rom-com Tomo-Chan Is a Girl!, a story about Aizawa Tomo, a girl who has a crush on a childhood friend, Jun.  The catch is that Jun thinks of Tomo as one of the boys, and she has to go against her tomboyish tendencies to get him to feel otherwise.  The manga is a four-panel (4-koma) gag manga that started out on Twitter before moving to another website and being published in print.  The series is ongoing, with six volumes out so far.  Seven Seas will publish the first volume in September with an MSRP of $12.99.

Click Gallery below for full-size images of all covers plus more Mashima sketches!