TOKYOPOP Memories

So today marks my last day as an editorial intern at TOKYOPOP.

It sounds a little sad, but if you don’t already know, I’ve been hired as a freelance editor. It’s my first job post-college. I feel incredibly lucky to have it.

While I’m super excited to finally get paid for what I’ve been doing for free (For 40 hours/week, for 6 months last summer and this winter), freelancing means I won’t be here in the office as much and talking to the editors. I won’t be able to have lunch with my other interns at the food trucks outside our building. I won’t get to participate in some fun stuff like acquisitions meetings and writing for the newsletter. (If you’re wondering why I was moaning about noodles on twitter on Wednesday.) It just won’t be quite the same.

But I feel so happy to have broken into this industry. Towards the end of my college years I realized that straight journalism wasn’t for me. Blogging works for me, but standard newspaper style writing? Interviewing a set number of sources? Calling and emailing and practically stalking people just to get them to talk to you? Not anymore, thanks.

But manga… manga, I really do love. I love being able to read it, even if it means I have to read a certain manga about 10 times in one month. I love being able to say: “I read manga for a living.” or “I work with manga.” I’ve been in love with manga for almost a decade now. I’ve loved comics for untold years before that.

It’s actually kind of funny. When I first got into manga, I didn’t even realize that there was such a thing as a manga editor. Don’t ask me how I thought manga got licensed, translated, adapted, lettered, etc. from Japanese to English, but that’s what I thought. Now, obviously, I’m a bit more knowledgeable. So much so that it surprises my superiors sometimes, even if I don’t think I’m THAT knowledgeable. XD

I first got the idea to even try for an internship from my good friend Annaliese, who was a design intern for Viz and now freelances for them. I didn’t even know you could do that until she told me about it! Where the hell had I been?!

So thank you Annaliese, for putting the idea in my head and telling me to go make TOKYOPOP better with my awesomeness. Thank you Christy and some other gals from Go!Comi for putting up with me at Yaoi-Con ’08 for talking to you ALL CON LONG about manga, wanting to break into the industry and a million other things. Thank you, Stu Levy, for randomly finding my whiny tweets about not hearing back from TP and getting Tom’s email for me. Thank you, Tom, for not dismissing me when I accidentally made a typo in an e-mail when I was still an intern applicant. Thank you, Marco and Lillian, for liking me enough to hire me before I’d even managed to get out of L.A. immediately after our interview. Thank you, Cindy, for taking me under your wing when you realized that I wanted a job with TP. Thank you to everyone else at TP who I worked with closely for your patience with me and giving me feedback when it was necessary. (I love feedback!)

You guys made me feel really really loved. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, believe me, but at the end of the day, I can say I get paid for doing something I really really love: reading manga. That’s pretty damn awesome and it makes me pretty damn happy.

So, anyone need a freelance manga editor/writer?