At The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon picked up on something I missed in the distribution article below:
The NYT article also lets drop the approximate number of clients Tokyopop picked up in its Sunday newspaper launch: 30, a solid number perhaps better than it sounds depending on the percentage of big-paper clients.
That percentage seems to be pretty high. Here’s the list from the creators’ website:
Newspapers already on board to run the series include the Chicago Tribune, Detroit News, Los Angeles Times, Denver Post, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Portland Oregonian, Tucson Citizen, Boston Globe, Gardner MA News, Vancouver Sun and the Calgary Alberta Herald!
And then St. Paul, Minnesota, picked it up last week. Glaringly absent from that list is any mention of New York, and I can’t tell if the Daily News or the Post has picked it up. I’m not sure it matters there.
The strip does seem to be well placed, but as I commented the other day, the Sunday funnies may not be the ideal format for manga. The Boston Globe runs it unreadably small, and the syndicator seems to have dropped a lot of pages to make the story move faster. It would have made more sense to run Azumanga Daioh on the daily pages than to put a slice’n’diced Peach Fuzz in only on Sundays.
I hate to say this, but I’ve been really underwhelmed by what I’ve seen of the “Tokyopop Presents” strip in the SF Chronicle. The first printed strip started with a recap of what ends up happening in the next few panels. The layout didn’t read well (it looked like it was a page of the manga shrunk even further) and the story didn’t read like it was meant to be serialiezd at that pace. Plus, since it looked like a page ripped from a digest, I found myself asking why I was reading the strip when I could just buy a Peach Fuzz digest and not have to bother with reading a page-at-a-time.