At Anime on DVD, Ed Chavez’s series continues with a look at how CMX fared in 2005. Actually, it’s about how CMX became the most reviled manga publisher of 2005, after editors there decided to redraw the naughty bits out of Tenjho Tenge (for those late to the party, the details are here). When the fans reacted with predictable rage (hey, CMX, read blogs much?), the publisher responded with… nothing. Bad move.
The upshot is that although CMX did publish some really good manga last year (Gals! and Kamikaze Kaito Jeanne are big in my house, and Chikyu Misaki is getting good word-of-blog), no one noticed. That’s partly due to Ten-Ten-gate and the distrust that followed and partly due to CMX’s failure to get the word out about new titles.
Now CMX is the publisher everyone loves to hate, and that’s not entirely fair. Ed points out that most of their titles have escaped Bowdlerization and the translations are pretty good (I’ll have to take his word for that). Bottom line:
CMX has the infrastructure, they have the production abilities but until they have the love for manga (and I am not joking), I do not think readers will consider them a major publisher any time soon.
