TokyoPop

I mentioned in my last post that TokyoPop restructured in 2008. What does that mean? Well, for one, they're not glutting the market any more.

All right, that was a little mean. I have a certain fondness for TokyoPop; my first introduction to manga was Sailor Moon, which they published (back when they were Mixx. Trivia! TokyoPop published their earliest manga series under the PocketMixx title. Tell your friends, they'll be amazed that you know something so obscure. Or not), and they've published other series that I've reread often despite owning them for years (Jing: King of Bandits, Pet Shop of Horrors). It's just that they've made an easy target of themselves due to the aforementioned glutting, and also due to the poor quality of their translations--which goes back to the glutting again, because when you push to get so many different titles out on a monthly basis, it overworks the translators/adapters who wind up doing "good enough" work. (Pet Shop of Horrors is a prime example of this; you can easily tell when the translation is sloppy or even straight-out altered, because the dialogue is laid out in a way that doesn't mesh up with the speech bubbles. Like I said, easy target.) Viz suffers from this too, to a lesser extent; their earlier, more adult work was very high quality, but when they got the rights to publish an English version of Shonen Jump, the monthly deadlines and increased output decreased the quality.

But all of that aside! TokyoPop's 2008 changes were the beginning of the shift toward digital delivery of manga that we're seeing more of in 2011. I'm going to leave aside all the complicated legal shenanigans that the restructuring meant (you can read about that on Wikipedia, if you're interested): basically, TokyoPop lost the licensing rights to several series, and has discontinued translation of others (again, see the last post re: the Kingdom Hearts 2 manga). Add in that TokyoPop is now closing its North American publishing company, and that the U.K. company will be closing soon as well since it imported so many titles from there, and what does that signify?

Well, for one, that my above comment was really pretty mean.

All hope's not lost, though--at least yet. A lot of manga publishers are moving to counter scanlations with cheaply-priced digital manga--not only English publishers, but Japanese ones as well. Yen Press and Viz, as well as TokyoPop, have digital versions of many of their titles; and there's another company called JManga, which is a consortium of 39 Japanese publishers! (I'd link to it, but it's still in beta mode. This site tells more about it, though!)

As someone who grew up relying on scanlations and fansubs for manga and anime that wasn't available in English yet, I think the publishers have their work cut out for them. Here's hoping they succeed, though; I've seen manga series that I loved get canceled mid-translation because it wasn't selling (Bride of Deimos, From Eroica with Love, Category: Freaks, Kingdom Hearts 2!) and companies go under (CMX, Dr. Masters), so here's hoping that with publishers offering a cheap, digital alternative to scanlations (hopefully with better translations!), the companies that're still around will stay that way.

(Don't worry if you don't have an ereader or personal computer, though--we'll still be buying print copies of manga here at the library!)