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!)

Publishers: Yen Press

Since I’ve mentioned Yen Press a few times in the last months (in reference to K-On and Kobato, as well as some upcoming titles), I figured I should give a little background on them.

Yen Press is a subset of Hachette Book Group USA, a company owned by Hachette Livre (a French company, so it’s not surprising that they’ve tackled such a wide range of manga titles--there's a lot more manga translated into French than there is into English, and titles tend to come out faster over there, too. The entire run of Yugioh was out in France when Shonen Jump was just getting into the start of the card game). Yen Press is also one of the newest of newcomers (that are still around) to the manga translation world: it was founded in 2006.

Yen Press took a page out of Del Rey Manga’s book and published translation notes with their volumes. They also tend to include honorifics; there are some exceptions, such as Black Butler, where they’ve eschewed honorifics because they would feel out of place to an English-reading audience (since that series is set in Victorian London). Unlike Del Rey, however, Yen Press doesn’t usually include a few translated or untranslated pages of the next volume at the end of a manga; they default more to a ‘teaser,’ similar to Tokyopop’s model. The difference is that Yen Press tends to do a full page teaser complete with summary and a panel from the coming volume, while Tokyopop typically only does a summary.

Yen Press is also what I would consider the most otaku of manga translators--they pretty much dived in assuming that their predecessors (Del Rey, Viz, Tokyopop, and some smaller companies like CMX or DrMaster) had sufficiently introduced manga and basic Japanese culture to the mainstream that they could dispense with Anglicizing their titles. They’ve also been the main introducer of manhwa, or Korean manga, to America (like Cynical Orange and Hissing); and they’re also publishing a few original English titles, like the Maximum Ride series and the Twilight graphic novel. So while they may not be the best place to start if you’re unfamiliar with manga, once you get the hang of it I highly recommend them!

Publishers: Del Rey Manga

I mentioned last week that Del Rey is the English publisher for xxxHolic, along with many other titles (including Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles, Gundam Seed Destiny, the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney comics, and some of my favorites like Air Gear and Ghost Hunt), and I thought I should give a little more background on them.

Del Rey Manga (which is a subset of Del Rey Books, a scifi and fantasy publisher) is a relative newcomer to the manga translation world. They began publishing manga series in 2004, and are probably most famous for being the first to consistently include honorifics in their translations, to maintain Japanese references within works instead of converting them to equivalent English ones, and to have notes at the beginning and end of each volume of their manga to explain both of these to new readers and readers unfamiliar with Japanese culture. Del Rey also began a practice of including a few pages, still in the original Japanese, of the next volume of a series in the back of the manga; but unlike the notes on honorifics and references, this is not consistent for each series.

Del Rey took the foundation that its main predecessors, TokyoPop and Viz, had built in bringing over manga titles, and added to it by assuming that manga had settled enough into the American landscape that more of its original, Japanese aspects could be preserved without causing too much confusion (or risking a rejection of the titles!). And since the manga they've brought over has been enjoyed for six years now, they may have gambled right. Del Rey's manga titles might not be the right place to start if you're just beginning to explore this whole 'manga thing,' but if you see one you want to read among their series, the notes will make sure you don't lose the story among the translation.