Discussion: How do manga publishers make you mad?

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Daniella Orihuela-Gruber

It seems to me there have been a lot of reasons for manga fans to rejoice these past few years, but also a lot of reasons for manga fans to grit their teeth because of something a manga publisher has done.

Admittedly, it’s easy for me to see where some publisher decisions are coming from. The manga publishing industry needs at least three things in order to succeed: money, the good favor of the Japanese rights holders and the good favor of the fans. A lot of publishing decisions fans hate seem to stem from the first two, but you can’t win over the fans if you don’t have either money or happy rights holders.

That said, fans will be bitter even if they understand the decision, and there is definitely still one publishing decision that makes me really mad: the sudden closure of CMX by its parent company, DC.

I understand why CMX was closed, it wasn’t making DC any money and times were too tight for an imprint not to be making money. It was really the way  DC handled the situation that bugged me, and still bugs me to  this day. By this I mean that the shut down was so sudden that CMX had new licenses popping up on Amazon the day before.

It was just disrespectful to CMX and to the manga fans who loved CMX to treat the company in such a manner. If DC had bothered to let CMX know long enough ahead of time, then the new licenses could been pulled before the fans found out and got their hopes up. Instead, it was so sudden that I have to wonder if the CMX employees found out their jobs were getting wiped in a manner similar to how I found out about Tokyopop ceasing its North American publishing operations. (I found out from news sources, not from the company itself.) That was a deeply hurtful experience for me, just to give you some emotional context.

Anyway, there are many ways publishers can upset fans, but I want to know what has grinded you the most. So feel free to rant away in the comments section about your hated publisher of choice! (Although I can’t promise to respond to every comment due to my position as an editor for some companies. Sorry! I just want to hear what people hate the most as manga fans.)

Posted in Discussion, manga, opinion | Tagged , , , , , | 51 Comments

I Miss Tokyopop, Sort Of

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Daniella Orihuela-Gruber

This post, in its original incarnation was a stupid rant about how I can’t find more work in the manga industry right now. I thought about publishing it today and decided against it because it was just me whining. Then this little announcement from Tokyopop comes along…

(Click on the picture to see the facebook status.)

*Sigh*

The thing about this is that Hetalia vol. 3 had finished production right before Stu Levy shut Tokyopop down. Aside from printing, distribution, etc., it is paid for. Stu, if he still has the rights to publish it, can publish the heck out of Hetalia vol. 3 if he wants to.

The thing is: it’s not fair to the fans. (And I don’t mean just the Hetalia fans.) It is unfair because there are many fans out there who would love to see the next volume of Maid Sama, Gakuen Alice and all the other Tokyopop titles that they were expecting before the sudden shutdown. In fact, they’ve said so in the comments of that Facebook status. Clearly, fans want Tokyopop back, even if it’s just for that one last volume of their favorite series.

And there are volumes of Maid Sama, Gakuen Alice, Skyblue Shore and a number of other titles that we had finished production on only a few weeks before Tokyopop’s closure was announced. I was working on scripts for Chibisan Date and Diary of a Crazed Family right before the closure. I had even asked my managing editor to work on Flat after its previous editor had been laid off, but that title was months away from reaching editorial.

That means there are quite a number of licenses paid for and/or nearly ready for print. Stu could, if he wanted to, finish up the production with some help and put those titles out, assuming the Japanese rights holders haven’t yanked away those licenses already. I don’t know if he’d make the same kind of money off them as he would Hetalia, which sold gangbusters, but he’d probably still make some money off the more popular ones.

But, I’m guessing, this facebook status does not signal the resurrection of Tokyopop or a chance at getting Hetalia vol. 4 published. It’s probably a grab for money, to cut some of the losses that Tokyopop took by shutting down, although I couldn’t say for sure.

What I can say for sure is that I miss working for Tokyopop as much as I miss the excellent titles they had on their roster. (And some of the less excellent titles too.  Zone-00 may have had only half a dozen fans, but I was one of them.)

It was slightly less enjoyable towards the end, with my workload snowballing horrifically and the awful lettering teams we had, but I enjoyed almost everything I worked on. Tokyopop gave me a consistent work schedule and consistent pay, something I’m not getting in the manga industry without them.

If I could work with the people I worked with at Tokyopop again, I would do it in a heartbeat. Even for the same pay, which I now know is too low. I didn’t work directly with Stu, so the fact that the company is his wouldn’t bother me unless he made himself part of the production process again. But I would totally take back the Tokyopop where Stu ran around and did weird vanity projects while the rest of us worked on manga because that’s all we could really hope for at this point.

And, in the end, it would make me happy to see my name on the Hetalia credits page once more. Just not like this, Stu. If you’re going to publish manga again, please bring Tokyopop, the North American manga publisher, back to life.

Posted in Discussion, manga, news, opinion | Tagged , , , | 26 Comments

Manga Sale!

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Daniella Orihuela-Gruber

I have a small number of duplicate manga volumes lying around my apartment right now that needs to go.

Here’s the deal: All manga costs $4 plus shipping (so your manga doesn’t arrive torn to pieces because of a shoddy envelope. All purchases will be shipped in an envelope protected by bubblewrap.) If you buy more than one volume, I’ll throw in free shipping.

All manga is very gently used, meaning there are tiny marks around the edges of the covers, but nothing else in terms of damage, unless otherwise marked. Any purchases made before Tuesday (9/13/2011) will be shipped on that date. All payments will be made via Paypal unless I trust you enough to send me a check & you can’t pay any other way.

Gakuen Alice, TOKYOPOP, volumes 1 and 3

Teru Teru X Shonen, CMX, volumes 3- 5

Mars, TOKYOPOP,volume 11

Tears of a Lamb, CMX, volume 7

Happy Mania, TOKYOPOP, volume 7

The Name of the Flower, CMX, volume 2 (Condition: Brand new, Still in comic book shop wrapping.)

The Secret Notes of Lady Kanoko, TOKYOPO, volume 2

Aria, TOKYOPOP, volume 5

Versus (VS.), CMX, volume 5

And, if I don’t have what you’re looking for, Anna over at Manga Report also has a manga sale going on!

Posted in manga | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Discussion: Do You Know How Much Manga You Have?

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Daniella Orihuela-Gruber

I recently agreed to participate in a photo blog series about people’s manga shelves over at Manga Bookshelf. This opportunity to show off has given me a little pause as I prepare and photograph my collection. Is my collection interesting or is it a little one-sided? Are my shelves too messy because I share them with a few of my work materials, DVDs and tchotchkes? And, most importantly, how much manga do I actually have?!

As I explained last week, in a discussion about moving with your manga collection, my collection is technically split between my mom’s house (all high school and college purchases) and my current apartment.

Someday, the two collections will be reunited when I can have my dream home office. The walls will be painted a calming color reminiscent of green tea. I will have a spacious desk looking out onto a beautiful garden, instead of a kitchen table looking out onto some palm trees that need trimming. There will be many short bookcases lining the perimeter, so nothing falls on me during an earthquake. And, if I get my way, there will be a cute corgi or corgi-mix (rescued, of course) lying at my feet as I work! But until I get a large-enough home office, I won’t know exactly how much manga I own.

Right now, I know I have 1,080 volumes of manga, manhwa and OEL titles, including series that are split between my apartment and my mom’s place. At my best guess, that probably accounts for about one half to two-thirds of my entire collection, leaving the rest uncounted at my mom’s. (Update: After visiting my mother over the long weekend, I’ve determined that I have 1414 volumes of manga in total.) That’s with 2-in-1 and 3-in-1 omnibi counted as one volume and not including anything I classified as non-manga comics or my boyfriend’s much smaller collection of manga and comics. Yeah.

So, how many manga do you own? Do you catalog what manga you own? If so, how do you do it? If not, why haven’t you bothered taking stock of your collection?

This was my first time trying to catalog my collection, so I’m afraid it was a lot of me hunching over the bookshelves in my apartment and scribbling in a notebook.

Posted in Discussion, manga | Tagged , , , | 71 Comments

Discussion: Moving with Your Manga

Posted on August 25, 2011 by Daniella Orihuela-Gruber

My boyfriend and I have started the search for a new (much larger) apartment this week, and while we haven’t secured a place yet, my mind is on moving soon.

It’s then that I look at my bookshelves, double stacked and packed to the brim, as well as the piles of unread manga on my floors, and think, “oh my goodness, moving is going to suuuuuuuck!”

It also reminds me of moving around during college with my manga collection. Always having to move into some tiny space with little room for anything other than your text books, or move on to the next place or move back home entirely for a few months, just to drag everything back again. Then, once you leave college and get your own place, it’s probably just as tiny & cramped. It’s no wonder half of my manga collection is still at my mom’s house.

Yet, my mind isn’t on reducing my collection in order to make the move easier on me. Probably because, since we’re moving into a bigger place, I’ll finally be able to reunite the two halves my long-separated collection. But what do other people do when they have to move?

So, if you’ve moved recently, or a past move has affected your manga, how did you deal with it?

I think the most I’m going to do is try and sell some volumes that I bought multiples of. There’s not a lot of unwanted stuff in my collection!

Posted in Discussion, manga, opinion | Tagged , , , | 19 Comments

August MMF: Foodie Yoshinaga, Sushi & Me

Posted on August 22, 2011 by Daniella Orihuela-Gruber

I have an insatiable Austrian sweet tooth. It’s genetic and it’s OK if you don’t believe me, but just try and keep me away from sweets after I re-read Antique Bakery for the twelfth time.

I grew up in a family who enjoyed sweets of all kinds as something that was eaten before dinner or in favor of dinner, and who came from a culture where your local coffee shop serves cakes and ice cream instead of dry biscotti. The fictional setting of Antique Bakery might as well be like “home” to me with it’s exquisitely wrought desserts.

Ah, but that’s not the only place where Fumi Yoshinaga succeeds as a food writer.

Let me explain: I really hate fish. In an attempt to get me to like it as a child, many forms of fish were “disguised” as chicken. But I could see through my mother’s lies. (I was a pretty picky eater back then.) During college, I wound up getting some beta fish as pets and the thought of someone eating anything like one of my pets did not sit well with me. On a trip to Vietnam, the group I was with was repeatedly served fish that was cooked, but still looked like it could be alive. I don’t have a weak stomach, but watching people pick flesh off a fish whose eyes were looking straight at me was totally nauseating. The only fish I can stand to eat is in the form of tuna fish sandwiches, which must be doused heavily with mayonnaise or another strongly-flavored condiment before consumption.

Years later, Not Love But Delicious Food Makes Me So Happy was published. I read it with gusto as I do with any Fumi Yoshinaga manga (I have her entire English-language oeuvre and I make it a point to seek out new releases immediately) and came across this page:

Someone please tell me how you’re supposed to resist the desire to eat sushi after seeing A-dou and Y-naga’s near-orgasm over that medium-fat tuna?

Only an intense desire to impress a sushi-loving crush has ever made me want to eat fish before. (I figured he’d steer me in the right direction, sushi-wise. He started dating one of my closest friends and that killed my eagerness to impress him.) Thankfully, Yoshinaga’s description of that sushi only lasted a few pages and the chapter on the unagi restaurant didn’t make me want to run to my nearest Japanese food joint for fish. I still have trouble re-reading that page though.

But at the same time, I’ve not felt so swayed by other foodie manga. Oishinbo does a great job at describing what makes delicious, gourmet food so amazing, but I’ve never wanted to try any of their fish dishes. I did want to try the texture of one dish once, but the idea of it being seafood killed that food boner pretty quickly.

Ekiben Hitoritabi, which I just read on Jmanga, doesn’t even come close. Sadly, the main character’s excitement over finding an ekiben he wants is more interesting than when he actually eats one.

I think it’s not just Yoshinaga’s fangirl-like obsession with deliciousness that makes her a good food writer. She has a down-home quality to her foodie-ness that makes her easy to relate to. Not every foodie is a die-hard who knows about every ingredient or technique behind a dish, so Yoshinaga geeking out over an incredible flavor that she didn’t know existed is more realistic to the average reader than watching a battle of complicated technique. Impressive as technique is, it can feel too much like something for professionals.

Food is something that’s for everyone and Yoshinaga gets that. It’s not that Fumi Yoshinaga’s other manga is bad, but there’s truly something magical happening whenever she writes about food.

Posted in manga, opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Pros and Cons of Jmanga.com

Posted on August 19, 2011 by Daniella Orihuela-Gruber

Now that Jmanga.com has opened up its site for all users, digital manga in English has taken another step towards its Utopian ideal. It’s not the most perfect site, but Jmanga does have some edge against competitors.  Let’s take a look at where the site is at its best and worst.

Pros:

  • A point system that doesn’t require crazy math (if you’re living in America): I know everyone hates the point system. Why can’t we just pay in dollars? I totally agree, but my boyfriend (who works in Facebook gaming) explained the benefit of a point system to me from Jmanga’s point of view. If Jmanga does intend to go global, it’s much easier for those who manage the site to set up their own currency in order to provide for multiple real-world currencies. That way a credit card transaction will automatically convert the price of the points to the currency of the buyer, but every buyer will get the same amount of points. Lucky for Americans, the price of 100 points equals $1, so we don’t have to worry about doing multiple calculations to figure out the price of a book. The only downsides to the point system so far is that there are so few options for buying points and that Jmanga hasn’t really created discount bundles.  (I.E. paying $25 for 3000 points, etc.)
  • Manga that no one really wants to print (or re-print) in English: This is clearly the best thing about Jmanga so far. My favorite being Ekiben Hitoritabi, which is about traveling to different parts of Japan via train to eat bento sold at Japanese train stations. I’ve already bought the first volume and devoured it! (I love cooking and I used to make bento for myself and others everyday.) On top of that, there are plenty of Tokyopop titles and CMX titles which I know will bring a lot of joy to anyone who was following Pet Shop of Horrors or Sgt. Frog. (Myself included.) This is the part of the site that will probably be the most successful unless they start simultaneous releases of Naruto or One Piece.
  • Jweekly magazine: It’s the little things that help along a site that needs to be adopted by a large number of users in order to be successful. Thus, distributing Jweekly magazine with full chapter previews is a plus, especially when most of the previews are currently limited to a few pages each. I think the magazine idea will be more successful if they showcase different chapters of manga in every issue to whet the appetite of readers rather than serialize a chapter of Naruto each week.
  • An easy-to-use website & registration/payment system: It’s fair to say that Square Enix’s complicated digital manga portal is probably losing the company a lot of potential business. In comparison, using Jmanga.com is a breeze. Setting up an account and a subscription (including the credit card transaction) was super-simple. No hoops to jump through at all. Even when you purchase a manga, you can take the option of reading it now or moving on and reading it later. Sure, the site could use a pay by Paypal option, but I imagine that will come in sooner or later. The only major design issue I have is that the menu bar on the top is extremely repetitive. It would be more helpful to put up a button on top for the FAQ or the user guide rather than three or four different ways to browse their manga selections.
  • A decent subscription model: I know a lot of people dislike the $10 subscription that Jmanga has set up so far, but it has it’s hidden benefits. Subscribers get 1500 points when they first sign up and 1050 points each month afterward. That’s not enough to get you two whole volumes on your first month unless you buy more points, but it is enough to get you an extra volume on your third month with some left over (assuming all of these volumes are priced at 899 points and that you don’t get extra points.) So you do accumulate extra points to buy more manga, even if it is a somewhat slow process. And you can easily opt out of the $10 subscription at any time by going to your personal page and switching back to a free subscription.

Cons:

  • It’s pricier than what you can buying printed volumes online: I know a lot of people have been saying: “but some of this manga you can’t get in print or in English!” That isn’t really the point. Most people will be willing to pay more for those manga, but if Bleach or any other already published manga is more expensive than its print version, it defeats the point of buying it on a digital medium where you don’t really own it. (Especially when Vizmanga.com offers it up for cheaper.) The only way you’re going lose a printed copy of a manga is if it’s sold off, stolen, burned or otherwise made unreadable. But digital copies could be taken away from you whenever the publisher or provider wants. Thus, why would people want to pay more for something so impermanent? Plus, I’m a strong believer in the idea that if you lower the price point, the more people will buy what you’re selling. These are tough economic times and so a lot of people are attracted to getting entertainment for cheap. Lowering prices might not attract the pirates, but it will definitely attract the readers who’ve been holding out until they could get a manga for $4.99 or less. It’s simple economics, more people are more likely to buy something if it’s at a price that they feel reflects the worth of the product. If Jmanga can slash prices low enough to make people not think twice about buying a manga off their site, a la 99 cent songs on iTunes, I bet they’ll see a decent spike in paying customers.
  • You can only read it on a computer: I’m sure this is something that Jmanga will address in the future, but it’s important to ALL digital manga providers that their content is available on just about every kind of e-reader, smart phone or gadget that users can connect to the internet with. Unfortunately, no digital manga provider has accomplished this yet and the process of getting manga on more than just one platform has been slower than molasses. It doesn’t help that both Apple and Kindle have taken it upon themselves to become literary gatekeepers and censor anything they find unseemly. The faster Jmanga gets this process going, the better.
  • This is nitpicking, but the translations, lettering and editing could definitely use work: One of the first previews I read on Jmanga was Milk Morinaga’s Girlfriends. I hadn’t read it before and I am far from fluent in Japanese, but I could tell the adaptation was way too stiff and clunky. It was a little disappointing because one of my biggest problems with the vast majority of scanlations is that their adaptions are difficult to read. Erica Friedman confirmed this on Twitter by comparing it to the quality of Yuri scanlations. (The scanlations had a better translation.) Ekiben Hitoritabi has a decent adaptation, but some serious lettering problems (no hyphens, text floating out of the word balloons, no ellipses) in the first chapter that only improves every once in awhile during the rest of the volume. It’s not absolutely necessary to hyphenate a word on the syllables, but it sure looks a lot better. It also could really stand to have some translation notes when the main character rattles off train histories or opens up a bento. (Another thing that is occasionally remedied in the margins of the manga, but not always.) I know translation notes are not something that not a lot of manga publishers do in the U.S., but foodie/train manga like Ekiben Hitoritabi needs to get that kind of treatment. I doubt a serious foodie, let alone a normal reader, can get all the Japanese food names, not to mention all the talk about trains!

Other than that, I’m having problems coming up with anything big to complain about. Sure, it would be great if their zoom function worked better. Yeah, it’d be great if they had more selection. But this is a growing site. Aside from the issues mentioned above, I’m feeling mostly satisfied with Jmanga’s launch. (I was initially skeptical, but the site grew on me after a few days.)

What do you think about Jmanga? What are your favorite things about it and what are the site’s biggest flaws to you?

Posted in Discussion, manga, news, opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , | 14 Comments