MangaBlog

Have you submitted nominations for the manga awards yet? Time is running out.

Dragonball Z comes to an end. At the link, Ed puts it in perspective:

In many ways DBZ helped make Viz’s magazine Shonen Jump. Either YuGiOh or DBZ was on the cover for the first year so the Kamehameha power could not be denied.

DBZ is about to wrap up. And when I got this PR email from Viz, I almost deleted it without opening. So after thinking about it I started to wonder “what about Viz without DBZ?”

Shonen Jump is in great shape. Great titles, a good number of subscribers and advertizers are still hanging on so that’s in good condition. SJ Manga is only getting better – CLAYMORE, Death Note and Reborn are great titles people should get excited about. Yeah, Viz is still censoring titles and their QC is meh at best but these guys are the biggest and pretty close to the best and DBZ helped them get their.

Happy birthday Shojo Beat!

The Daily Yomiuri asks Will Pixels Pummel Paper? In comments to yesterday’s post, Jack says that will only happen if we can find a good portable manga reader.

The Avatar Cine-Manga, which to be honest I’ve never heard of, has sold over 500,000 copies. Apparently much of its success is due to Scholastic book fairs, which is the most direct of the direct markets. Bring the books to the kids’ school and they will buy.

Local newspapers discover manga in Boston and northwestern Indiana. The latter evokes a few memories, as I’m from South Bend, Indiana, and my family’s anime and manga odyssey began when my kids found Kiki’s Delivery Service in the public library there.

The Lincoln Heights Literary Society likes Cafe Kichijouji de. Me too! And Tangognat takes time out from pre-wedding madness to enjoy Her Majesty’s Dog.

ComiPress has a list of the best selling shoujo manga of all time. The top seller is Boys Over Flowers, and Nana is number 4. Pata has some good analysis. My own reaction was surprise at how many of the top-selling titles are licensed in English. Google any of the titles and you’ll find scanlations, though. Looking at this list makes me realize that, legal or not, scanlations really are filling a niche.

This article in Mainichi Daily News has lots of interesting nuggets about sales of Japanese manga in other countries. Like this:

Currently, reports Tsukuru (June), Shonen Jump enjoys sales of between 300,000 to 350,000 per issue (of which subscribers account for 90,000 copies). Currently the manga are handled by such major retail chains as Waldenbooks and Wal-mart, and roughly two thirds of each issue are sold. Figures for Shojo Beat, however, have been somewhat less favorable so far, but it appears that about half of its 90,000 print run is sold.

I didn’t realize the difference in sales was that great; maybe it’s time to stop beatin’ on Viz for charging more for Shoujo Beat titles.

In Japan, sales of tankoubon are up while comics magazine figures are down. In fact, magazine sales have been dropping for the past ten years in a row, to 24.21 billion yen (still pretty respectable) in 2005. Meanwhile tankoubon sales have risen to 26.02 billion yen. That’s an interesting switch. I can see buying trades over floppies in the U.S., because it seems like a better deal, but I thought the Japanese comics magazines were priced low relative to the books. Maybe it’s not about price.

So where is the hottest market for overseas manga? Surprise! It’s Thailand. China is next, with its own Kodansha subsidiary. But there are problems:

“At present, we’ve received permission from the Chinese government to publish several comics, but the market remains restricted,” says Masatoshi Sumita, general manager for international rights at Kodansha.

As one way of circumventing the roadblocks, Kodansha joined forces with a Shanghai-based digital company named Tongli to begin distribution of two comics via the Web. At present, releases are issued at the rate of one per week, sold at the rate of 2 RMB each (roughly US $0.25).

But can you find them on Google?

In Asia as in Japan, tankoubon rule and boys are OK with reading girls’ comics. And Europe looks wide open:

At the recently held Bologna Book Fair, Japanese publishers received encouraging inquiries from distributors in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Croatia.

“They seem to have done their homework, too,” smiles Masaaki Shindo, producer of the multimedia licensing bureau at Shogakukan Ltd., a major publishing house.

Of course. I’m sure there is a lively Croatian scanlation community setting the table for them.

UPDATE: Thanks to commenter Sai for pointing out that Mainichi mistranslated the sales figures for manga in Japan by a factor of ten. The correct figures are 242.1 billion yen for magazines and 260.2 billion yen for tankoubon. (Sai gives the exchange rate as 110 yen to $1.)

I guess he’s getting tired of posting everyone else’s awards, because Ed at MangaCast is proposing we start our own manga awards. He’s looking for nominations in the following categories:

Best Publisher
Best Manga Series
Best Short
Best Global Manga
Special Award

and he wants them by May 26. Check the link for all the details.

This week’s PW Comics Week has a little of this, a little of that. The lead story is on last weekend’s BookExpo America, where graphic novels were a notable presence. One interesting aspect of the article is how many obviously literary, ambitious graphic novels are out or in the works. Some look intriguing, although I don’t really think the world needs another biography of Richard Feynman. Anyway, we’re all about the manga, so if you didn’t get to the expo, here’s the 411:

This year Viz is celebrating its 20th anniversary. The manga publisher is continuing to move piles of Naruto books and preparing to launch the semi-self-referential Shojo Beat Mango Artist Academy, an unusual narrative manga how-to book, as well as its own version of original manga. It’s a soccer manga/promotional title called Next Stop: Germany, created as part of a World Cup promotion in conjunction with the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team, which will be available only at the two U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team exhibition games later this month.

Tokyopop’s venture into youth prose novels gets a mention, along with the planned Star Trek and Hellgate titles. And in the “Potpourri” category,

Vertical is following up its recently concluded Buddha series with another Osamu Tezuka project, Ode to Kirihito, launching this fall, and next year will see Keiko Takemiya’s science-fiction shojo manga To Terra. Watson-Guptill is preparing another of Christopher Hart’s popular how-to-draw-manga books, Manga Mania: Magical Girls and Friends. And Robert Napton, director of Bandai Entertainment’s recently launched manga publishing unit, announced a collaboration with Top Cow on a manga-sized edition of a Lara Croft, Tomb Raider book.

Elsewhere in Comics Week are a brief article about two new CMX properties, which focuses mainly on the hotly anticipated Train Man, and a preview of Dokebi Bride.

One of the really fun parts of living overseas is seeing how other countries view American culture. Here’s a double take on that, a Japanese news piece on Americans coming to Japan to savor otaku culture. It’s short and, well, interesting. (Via Boing Boing.)