Eden: Not so endless?

Fan alert! Ed Chavez says Dark Horse is “on the verge” of putting Eden: It’s an Endless World on hiatus.

Manga Jouhou editor riseabove77 is blogging from Anime Expo. Also: Scanlations of the Month!

Manga Recon’s Katherine Dacey-Tsuei gets a jump on the week with a list of this week’s new titles and a review of La Chevalier d’Eon. And at Comic Pants, Dan Grandell gives his picks of recent releases.

Manhwa are popular in Europe, according to this article in Hankoryu, and they are gaining on manga because “they are not as obscene or violent, while still managing to be just as sophisticated and interesting as their Japanese counterparts.” It’s a small but growing business, worth $668,000 last year, and the article claims that Europe accounts for 40% of the Korean export market. I’m not sure what it says that Korea exports more comics to Europe than to Asia (30%) and the U.S. (30%), but the titles listed in the article sound interesting, and I wish we could get them here.

We don’t usually discuss Supreme Court decisions here at MangaBlog, but this might affect lots of comics buyers: Last week, the court struck down a ban on minimum pricing. What does this mean to you and me? Johanna Draper Carlson and Simon Jones speculated last week that this may affect online retailers who offer deep discounts, and lo and behold! Already a games retailer is calling for manufacturers to do just that, in order to “support brick and mortar”:

I only hope that they have the wisdom to use these tools and remove the supply of products from the deep discounters.

… which makes it sound like there’s something vaguely disreputable about selling a product at the market price.

Reviews: At Manga Life, Dan Polley checks out vol. 1 of Gravitation and Miguel Douglas reads vol. 1 of Confidential Confessions. Samurai Champloo reviews Lovely Complex (released here as Love*Com). At Okazu, Erica Friedman reviews vol. 8 of High School Girls. It’s Manga Monday big-time at Comics-and-more, where Dave Ferraro reviews vol. 2 of La Corda d’Oro, vol. 8 of Monster, vol. 4 of Emma, and vols. 11 and 12 of Hana-Kimi. At Manganews, Jiji reviews vol. 1 of Blood Alone.

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Comments

  1. Woah, slow down Brigid. I never said canceling. The industry has levels like the terrorism alert system. Its on the verge of going on hiatus right now and discontinuation might be possible but thats still a couple levels away.

    I say that because Museum of Terror = discontinued. Reiko the Zombie Shop = on hiatus. There is a difference, especially to the fans who have been supporting the series. Yotsuba was on hiatus but thats back… Enmusu on the other hand…

  2. Sorry, Ed. I fixed it.

  3. Funny that European prudishness is given as a reason for manhwa’s popularity there, since Europeans often bemoan how puritan the US is.

    I very much wonder if European readers are reacting less to the ‘obscenity and violence’ and more to the misogyny present in so many manga.

  4. C’mon Ed, you should know by now that “hiatus” is just the sugar-coated publisher word for “canceled”. They may retain the license for the rest of the term, but they sure as hell won’t release another money draining book. WORST was on hiatus for how long? Yeah, and look how that turned out.

    Very disappointed. :(

  5. Octopus Girl, Eden, Reiko. Those morons. These are the only Dark Horse titles I buy…..excuse me, BOUGHT, because it looks like they’re going to manga heaven. They’re beginning to look as incompetent as CMX or ADV. Why doesn’t Dark Horse go to the online model instead for these titles to continue to run? Do something like Netcomics and offer the manga online instead of stiffing the fans like that?

  6. I like the paradox that Dark Horse has created for itself with cancelling more titles than any publisher in the past two years (and since ADV, really) while simultaneously publishing the longest-running manga series in English. It’s really hard for me to believe that more people are buying OMG than Eden right now, but I guess that must be the case.

    It’s also still hard for me to believe that it’s too big a loss to publish the last volume of Octopus Girl to complete the series for fans. I kept thinking they’d at least publish that one, because that just seemed spiteful. Now that Reiko’s gone… well, I think I’m done buying new series from Dark Horse.

  7. ChunHyang72 says

    It’s easy to hurl rocks at Dark Horse for canceling Museum of Terror and Octopus Girl, but if only a handful of hardcore fans are buying these titles, it doesn’t make economic sense to continue printing them. Profit margins for books are notoriously low even when you sell a lot of copies—for every best-seller, a publisher has 10 or 15 titles that barely break even (if that). I don’t see how Dark Horse could make money on a title that isn’t selling 5,000 or 10,000 copies per volume.

    That said, if I had an online option that would allow me to finish a series like Club 9 or Eden, I would definitely support it. I think the NETCOMICS model makes excellent economic sense: test a title online, grow an audience for it, and publish the series that develop the biggest following.

  8. mark thorpe says

    Something does not seem right about this. If Eden is such a poor seller, then why publish Endo’s Tanpenshu? If an author has a book that is not selling, then it sems to me that a publisher would not run out and buy another book from that same creator. Or vice versa; Viz bought Zombie Powder after the success of Bleach; Dark Horse bought everything Kazuo Koike ever wrote based on the popularity of lone wolf and cub. And – someone please correct me if I’m wrong – isn’t Eden supposed to end at volume 12? I could be totally wrong, it’s a number I read somewhere. But, after volume 8 ( is it 8 ? ) being solicited in the new Previews, why stop now so close to the end? Man, this is horrible.

  9. ChunHyang72 says

    Wikipedia lists 16 volumes for Eden and notes that the title is still being serialized in Afternoon. Here’s the link:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eden_(manga)

  10. Eden has run for 15 or 16 volumes so far, and is still running in Afternoon as far as I know.

    I will be very sad if they end up dropping the series. It’s very rare for me to get completely hooked on any one series these days, but I have thoroughly enjoyed Eden.

  11. Maybe Dark Horse should look at cutting the prices of some of their books. $12.95 might put them out of the price range of some readers.

  12. If a title doesn’t sell well, cutting price is the last thing a publisher can afford to do. If anything, they have to push it up in order to sustain it. The problem with Dark Horse Manga is that they don’t have any strong sellers like Fruits Basket or Naruto which could help offset the loss caused by weak series such as Eden, Satsuma or Reiko. I think Dark Horse should rethink their licensing policy and try to grab more mainstream properties (or make their catalog more girl-friendly) if they want to continue publish seinen manga.

  13. there a a few groups online still doing scanlations of Eden… if it gets dropped by DH, you’ll still be able to read it with a little searching

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