This week’s PW Comics Week is up, and DramaQueen takes center stage. It’s a nice, solid article that describes the line, what sets it aside from other publishers, and how the principal, Tran Nguyen, got started in the biz. Although it’s hard to imagine her asking her grandmother to contribute to a startup publisher whose mottos are “purveyors of fine man sex” and “harder, faster, cheaper.”
The gist of the article is that DQ does a better job because they are fans themselves, so they pay attention to what they’re doing. Here’s Christopher Butcher’s comment on their production quality:
“The dust jackets fit the books, the paper is high quality and the right cream color for manga,” says Butcher. “Out of the gate they were better than their competitors. They’re all about their fans and they love the material.”
Much is made of the extra explicitness in DQ’s books. And this was interesting:
DramaQueen hires translators with a fan background, some of who have worked in the scanlation community (scanning, translating and posting unlicensed manga online). DramaQueen actively takes advantage of their connection to the semi-legal scanlation market, working with sites that remove titles once they have been licensed for English-language publication.
That means they are getting titles that no one else has. But could this all be part of the Great Scanlation Conspiracy?
