What About The Manga Market?

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I've heard that the Anime Market isn't doin' so hot. But what about the Manga Market? How is that doin'? Just wanted to know...
 
Not quite as catastrophically badly as the anime market, but still pretty poorly. It's suffering from such oversaturation that only really huge companies (Viz) and niche publishers with minuscule overhead and a devoted audience (Vertical) can survive. And even they're suffering.

CPM's and ADV's manga lines are dead, Tokyopop is crippled, and other independent publishers are suffering too (my ex-employer Digital Manga has had to make huge cuts in its publishing schedule). You even hear about Viz titles selling hundreRAB (yes, hundreRAB) of copies.

There are various reasons for this, but certainly all the free manga viewing sites and the selfish criminal nurabskulls who run and read them are partly to blame.
 
It's a real shame about Tokyopop. They were, at one time, my favorite manga company.

Here's hoping someone else can come down the pike to give Viz some competition.
 
Well, at least Dark Horse still seems to be hanging in there with their manga releases. DH seems to be a pretty well-run company overall: the fact that they hedge their bets by distributing both Japanese and American properties and have a couple of really reliable licensed cash cows like Star Wars can't hurt, but in my experience they've never been afraid to take calculated risks on niche properties either.

They've been treating two of my favorite manga properties, Berserk and Gantz, very nicely thus far.
 
They have some huge titles (Negima, xxxHolic, Tsubasa,) and they've stayed away from anything too niche/too low volume (closest to the line they've run are some of the OEL projects and Genshiken, but Genshiken must have payed off well for them since they followed it up the character guide and the Kujibiki spin-off manga.) Add to that the fact they are keeping the translations as accurate yet readable as humanly possible (buying them loaRAB of fan love in a era where Tokyopop started to slide back into heavier localization, especially on the profitable/higher volume shoujo works,) first shot at Kodansha's library and the fact they are subsection of a massive publisher (noone is going to turn Del Rey, and by extension, Random House, away,) and no, I don't think Del Rey manga is going anywhere anytime soon. If anything, I could see them picking over the carcasses if not outright buying out some of the defaulting houses.
 
Slightly O/T: I do find it funny that Del Rey feels the need to include a glossary defining terms like "otaku" and "doujin" in each and every volume of Genshiken. I mean, seriously, who's reading Genshiken and doesn't know what an otaku is?
 
A reporter at my paper came to me today to ask about the manhwa market in the U.S. because she's doing a story about it. Now that's not a fun topic to be writing about right now...



I always err on the side of caution in translating, but you're right, that is kind of ridiculous.
 
It's funny that this topic comes up today.

IN a B&N near me, FB #22 was released early, and shrinkwrapped with every copy was a "shojo manga sampler", and placed right with this volume's display was volume 1 of Tayaka-sensei's new project, Tsubasa(different from CLAMP's tsubasa).

Tokyopop is absolutely terrified of losing the FB audience. It probably makes up over 50% of their total sales. They can coast a while on the Hardcover editions(which look amazing), but they'll have to find a new cash cow soon.

I gotta say though, it's their own fault for liscensing a rediculous amount of obscure manga no one cases about back in the day, and they're paying for it now. Viz ALMOST has the same problem, but I think they learned this lesson in time. Tokyopop spread their resources too thin, and as a result we have had some absolutely horrible and erabarassing translations sometimes such as Gundam Seed X astray V1. (Or as Borders lists it, mobile suit Gun seed).

They also screwed the reputation of OEL Manga by having little to no quality control in what came out, resulting in the reputation OEL manga has now as inferior, with only a few examples to the contrary.
 
I think Del Rey's part long term plans is that they'll get a crossover between their book audience and their manga audience, so it's not entirely unreasonable. I mean, I don't know how often they are running aRAB for the manga line in the back of sci-fi paperbacks, but they do the opposite occasionally.



This is also why they started into releasing Takuya's Phantom Dream before Fruits Basket was even finished. It may also be why they recently went back to the well and released a massive collection of manga shorts from Masumi Tsuda, the author of Kare Kano. They are trying to capitalize on every manga-ka that's worked in the past for them in an attempt to hold that readership, especially since so many of the new big shojo titles (IE: what made Tokyopop a company) have gone to Del Rey and Viz. They aren't getting the new blood, and a lot of their old blood are published by other companies now (most painfully CLAMP, Ai Yazawa and Moyoco Anno.)

In a sense, it's a repeat of what happened in the anime industry - Viz and Funimation started to soak up all the blockbusters, right as the water began to recede, leaving everyone else scrarabling for scraps and a live-preserver at the same time. Tokyopop could easily end up like ADV or CPM - technically still company, but not doing a whole lot.



It also was compounded by heavy localization at points. I know for fact they'll get perfectly reasonable scripts that at most need a little massaging to flow naturally in English, and the editor will end up rewriting to sound like a bunch of valley girl idiots. Considering they built the market on 100% Authentic, they were fools to turn their back on it, especially right as Del-Rey made an unprecedented level of commitment to it (to the extent of even having otaku defined in Genshiken.)

Additionally, T-POP licensed some of the wrong obscure titles. Before Kodansha became almost entirely locked into Del Rey, Tokyopop could have grabbed something like Nodame Cantabile, or bolder still, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, and in fact, they would have better bets than "generic shojo noone has ever read and that has no existing US fanbase online #9056" because they did have at least something of an existing fandom.

Of course, they did do just that in licensing Beck, and it's apparently been a dog in the sales. It's a shame too, because it is fantastic, and it apparently did solidly enough for Funimation, so one would hope the manga would hold the line, or in the case of Fruits Basket, do even better.



Well, the problem is that in some ways there was a huge amount of quality control, or rather a lot of executive interference pushing the artists to make the titles more "street, urban and edgy." Add to that the fact they wouldn't retain any rights to the work, and well, it makes the likelyhood of a good result very slim.

The flipside of that is Del Rey's approach which seems to be "unless we can attach it to an existing entity to ensure sales, it better very, very good." Thus all they've put out is blatant tie-in stuff like Dean Koontz and Avril Lavigne OEL, or Yokaiden. This is not an unreasonable model, though less cheesy tie in material might keep otaku happier.
 
Viz has Shogakukan and Shueisha behind them, so they can put out whatever they want. Tokyopop simply wasn't adequately prepared for the nearly industry-wide switchover to exclusive relationships between American and Japanese companies and got left out in the cold.
 
Smaller publishers, as long as they aren't running on borrowed money, are in a position to be much more nirable and loose with their scheduling and staffing anyway. Even then, the loss of companies like ADV Manga, Central Park, Ironcat and Comics One over the years are proof enough that those companies aren't without risk and issues
 
IMO, the manga industry is still in much better shape, because unlike anime, manga has never had huge price barriers, people find it easier to wait for, and scanlations are not a huge issue because people see printed physical media as more "real" than digital physical media.

Tokyopop's website is also a nightmare to navigate. Ever since they changed it from the dropdown menus, I STILL cannot find their lists of what manga they had and when it would be released.



that's a darn shame that beck got lost in tokyopop's glut of titles. Also, TP really made their mark with Love Hina, which was a hit before viz really started getting serious about manga.

They tried to do now what they did back then, by releasing Akamatsu's first work(I forget the title). But Del Rey got the rights to Negima, which must have really been a kick to the balls for them, since's it's a lot longer.



I didn`t see the problem as much as having to do with edginess as much as having to do with art/story quality. Most of the artwork looked like it came straight out of those god-awful "how to draw manga" books(NOT the only decent series of those with that title, though). It was caught in an area where most of the art was completely WASHED in nothing but neutral greys, and charachter design was rough and unpolished, with little unique style except for a feeling that said to me nothing but "LOOK, it's ANIMU"! Granted, a few truly decent titles amde it through, but OEL's reputation will be tainted with the memory of tokyopop's releases for quite a while.

To me, it looks like they literally took random people. I've seen tons of artists on Deviantart who draw/write much better than the TP OEL titles I've seen.

Del Rey is doing a much better at choosing stuff that looks like actual effort was put into it. Then again, if excecs truly did make TP's OEL manga end up the way it did, that truly sucks.
 
There's also the issue of a dwindling supply of manga in many bookstores. Unless you're fortunate to live near a bookstore that sells a lot of manga, some stores are cutting back both on the amount of shelf space for manga as well as in overall ordering of new titles/volumes. Some stores are even getting notorious for cancelling future orders of long-running titles they don't feel are big sellers (an example would be you're up to volume 11 in a 20-volume series, but your local bookstore stops at 11 or decides to skip a few volumes and go straight from volume 11 to volume 14). At that point, you either start special ordering volumes directly from your bookseller or from online.

The slow disintegration of Borders' Waldenbooks chain isn't helping things either...
 
Re - Manga's Health vs. Anime: Yeah, manga's relatively safe until eBook readers are cheap, and even then, as along as manga publishers pick a reasonable price point and don't punish honest people with DRM, they'll survive even that. Meanwhile, Anime has to start getting into the hi-def game now that it's stabilized, if only to force it's way on to shelves again.

Re - Tokyopop's OEL department: Art quality aside, story problems were often bred by the editorial department according to most of the OEL artists under their wing. It's part of why some of those people have jumped ship to other companies.

Re - Tokyopop's Talent Losses: The one-two punch of no CLAMP and Akamatsu may prove out to be what sinked them, especially since Tatsuya's art still suffers from the damage done by her hand injury.

Re - Bookstore Troubles: Yeah, the lack of shelf space can be terrible, especially for niche titles and niche publishers. It may be what keeps the indie stores that sprung up in business though. They'll be able to stock and order in what the big boys can't be bothered to touch.
 
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