Dany&Dany-- our runners-up for best global manga with their Yaoi Press book The Lily and the Rose --held a panel in one of the smaller panel rooms that was pretty full, and led by Yamila Abraham.

The duo is from the island of Sardinia, Italy and are big fans of manga, such as Naoki Urasawa (creator of Monster and 20th Century Boys) and Ai Yawazawa (creator of Nana). They've worked together for ten years writing and drawing, and Abraham notes that one of the biggest publishers in the U.S. is interested in translating some of their work.

She also announced that the twosome is working on a new project for Yaoi Press called Backstage, which has no release date yet but which will be a one-shot, full-book story. It will be published in the U.S. by Yaoi Press first and internationally later.

Apparently while they were growing up there were more Japanese cartoons in Europe than American, so they grew up with shows like Grandizer, Rose of Versailles, and Macross. They talked a bit about the history of yaoi in Europe, and in the beginning no publishers believed that BL could work in Italy. One publisher tried publishing Italian-made yaoi and folded after two years-- and then big publishers started importing and translating Japanese BL, which is cheaper than having it made. The success of those works opened up the way for more Italian-made BL like Dany&Dany's. Also, apparently Germany is bigger into BL than the U.S. Go fig!

Yamila also noted that next year, she'll be bringing M.A. Sambre-- the French woman who draws Yaoi Press' Dark Prince.

They also both do the art work as well as the writing work, by the way, but they each are in charge of drawing one of the two characters to keep the look of each character consistent.

And then we had to scoot out for our interview with Takanaga-sensei! We won't be posting the full version of that until we have time to transcribe it, by the way, which may or may not be tonight. We'll do our best!