Negima! fan Hata provided some information on February 29, 2012, regarding Negima! from Akamatsu-sensei, including some addressing of rumors.

— the final Negima volume 38 will be on sale May 17th, there will be no LE edition.

— Ken starts the final chapter today (Feb 29, 2012), even though he still has 58 panels to go for 354 yesterday, the last absolute deadline ever for Negima would be March 7th, (355). because of that there will be no update of J-Comi for the week.

— 37 LE is SOLD OUT on Amazon and Rakuten JP, so unless they emptied the storeroom for the reserve…

— the Negi birthday on his tombstone is the same as his seiyu Rina Sato (Railgun, Kaoru/Amagami) on 05/02, however the 1993 year is in conflict with Ken’s own note of Negi was born in 1994 summer in book 2, which of course is again in possible conflict of Nagi being sealed 10 years ago from 2003, this fixed it or just treat it as an alternative timeline.

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just to clear things up as Negima near the end, sources on where Ken said his things of course are from his twitters and blog diary,

— on the rumor that Ken did not give the movie ending to the animation team earlier enough, which cause them to only start to anime the movie a month before the premiere, and cause the editing/shorting of the anime by 20 minutes and making the ending in Ken’s own words, “confusing”, Ken replies that he gave the ending to Shaft around the beginning of the year, (the movie was shown on August,) so he had no idea what the rumor is about.

of course, the lost 20 minutes were added back on the LE DVD.

— on the apparently discrepancy of quality between the OAD and the movie even though both were done by Shaft, just remember, the OAD producer is Ken, the movie producer is Kodansha, enough said. Ken also said it is his style to let the anime team to do their job and not interfering.

— on the rumor the Negima met its “rush” ending because it was cancelled by the editors, (Ken use the word “truncate” for the English FB, which is really not the same exact word in Japanese, the word literally means “cut off at the waist”) which is something the mangaka at Shonen Jump are well aware of, Ken’s reply, in essence, there is no editors at Kodansha got the guts to cancel a title which can sell to more than 57,000 people an LE at that cost of 50,000 yen/more than TEN TIMES of a regular manga book.

— what is lost when people talks about the decreasing sales number of Negima from the beginning down to 200,000+ now, is the downward trend is a universal one, it is not that Negima sales just suddenly got bad, but every manga is suffering the same fate from scanlation except a few like One Piece, bear in minds Ken’s LE sales pack a punch that is the equivalent of many regular book in value, so while the sales numbers are down, the total intake is still amazing. not to mention the total sale of Negima is still 20 millions+ for just 37 volumes, so the average for each volume will easily work out to more than 500,000+ copies.

— I have been talking about this in various places, but there is no way Ken just suddenly decide to end the manga, this is at least a year or more in the planning, at the height of fan panic last year when the universal suspicion is the manga will end at the same time as the movie premier, Ken started a series of “each week/chapter a class 3A character says a few word on the author comment space on the index page of the Magazine.” then I said the manga will last a minimum of 31 more chapters, add on the break week will guarantee the manga to run at least until… FEBRUARY 2012! guess what? Yotsuba is the 30th and last one for C351 near the end of January, (twins share one space?) and I assume Negi close the deal on C352, the same chapter which disclosed the manga is ending in 3 more chapter.

As always, thanks Hata for providing all of this information. ^_^