But rather than derail matters, suffice it to say that the original Dragon Ball was NOT a fighting-oriented series in the least and underwent several gradual revisions over time with each successive “arc” or “saga” such that at the peak of its popularity it was a vastly different comic in tone, style, characterizations, and content than what it originated as. Modern-day shonen action/adventure looks and feels a lot more similar to the portion of the Dragon Ball manga that was animated as the series Dragon Ball Z than it does to the portion you speak of that was animated as Dragon Ball. And DBZ owes more to the later portions of Fist of the North Star than it does to an imaginative interpretation of Journey to the West: power beams, ki attacks, hair that changes color, etc.

Dragonball started out as a barely-funny gag comic. Why do you think it exploded in popularity after it shifted to a much heavier focus on “serious” fights?

Because it was mimicking the Hokuto no Ken template to achieve greater success.

Let me educate you a little bit.

Dragonball came out not long after Hokuto no Ken, and its characters and story were being thought up before Hokuto no Ken even saw the light of day in Shonen Jump. It was primarily based off Toriyama’s crazy imagination, chinese folklore and some hong kong movies at the time.

Dragonball was the template for naruto, bleach, one piece, kenshin, etc etc, it wouldn’t be the second best selling manga of all time if it was heavily influenced from a manga that came out a couple of months before.

In saying that, Hokuto no Ken is awesome, but don’t get too carried away there.

First President of Japan and Revenge of the Mouflon, at least, deserve to be kept in print by someone.

As you say Christopher, Raijin Comics was doomed from the very beginning. I remember reading one of the letters columns in Raijin and was horrified to hear the Editor say that by far, Guardian Angel Getten was the most popular title included in the magazine. For those who don’t know, this was a comic about a wimpy boy who gets an angel servant, who of course is innocent, sexy, and intimidates the hell out of him. Anime and manga in the US had already “gone gay” by the time Raijin came out, and that fanbase was even subsidizing the damn thing!

I can’t imagine what it would be like getting a fresh chapter of Fist of the Blue Sky and Grappler Baki in your mailbox every week. Maybe I’ll never know what it feels like. But here’s hoping this stuff makes a comeback in a big way, someday.

John: I think the Gutsoon peeps didn’t like the color scheme, and canceled the deal they had with the HK touch-up company which was working on the Masters over in Japan. But other than Bart’s hair color being wrong, I was fine with it, dammit. ;-; Oh, well, at least I got Buronson to autograph one of the things @ AX ’04….

*cries*

I can’t see buying a huge weekly just for City Hunter, but I guess maybe I would’ve depending on my disposable income for the week. I’m among the biggest Hokuto no Ken fan on this side of the Pacific, but the whole Chinese mafia/history thing just doesn’t do it for me.

RWG (though I probably would’ve ended up buying the HnK reprints)

Daryl: I will agree that Raijin should have published a “must-have” title, but I think the real issue was that the audience just wasn’t there yet for this content. The sports genre in general seems to do horribly here, due to American kids being fat. And if Berserk didn’t have that anime tie-in, it most likely would have bombed here, too, even though it got published around the same time as Gutsoon. But, in general, the kiddified Sweet Valley High crap was where it was at until it ironically killed itself with its own bubble. Now, ironically when there’s more risk being spread around, there is finally a market for series like Fist and City Hunter, because the fans still around after the “fad” are getting more sophisticated in their tastes, and won’t buy into look-alikes as much as they used to in the past.

I loved Raijin in a very wrong way and was sorry to see it go. But it was doomed. There just wasn’t enough of an audience in America for old-school manly-man manga. It’s the kind of stuff that appeals to longtime manga nuts, especially those who work in the industry, who love seeing something different, but your average manga fan or your average comic-book fan was just going to blink at it in confusion.

Comics Bunch is basically the Image Comics of Japan–a bunch of disgruntled star artists from a major label who left to form their own indie alliance–and bringing their work over here worked about as well as trying to sell Savage Dragon/Spawn crossovers in Tokyo.

Putting “Bow Wow Wata” into Raijin was indeed an insane move, but don’t forget that Tokyopop launched its first manga magazine with a lineup of Sailor Moon (cutesy magical-girl shojo), Cardcaptor Sakura (cutesy magical-girl shojo), Ice Blade (ultraviolent seinin action), and Parasyte (ultraviolent seinin sci-fi). And it worked! Of course, it worked because as soon as Mixx/Tokyopop realized the shojo stuff was selling, it ditched the seinin manga and started plugging the hell out of Sailor Moon.

I’m pretty sure the first sports manga in English was Rumiko Takahashi’s “One Pound Gospel.” Sure, it was mostly a romantic comedy, but it was also packed with multiple-chapter boxing matches.

Also, as far as Ironcat goes, it looks like they launched in 1997 with Cutie Honey, Flag Fighters, and Doctor! But the people who ran Ironcat were creating English translations of manga before that through Antarctic Press.

What struck me about Raijin was that their art direction was really ugly. Ugly fonts, too much text, colors from the “fireworks package” palette, can’t get enough of those metallic inks. Ugly in a way that works in Japan, with Japanese text, but with English text it gives off a cheap Hong Kong knockoff vibe. I can remember seeing the first Raijin release and thinking it was some kind of grey market quasi legal thing – when in fact the opposite was true. I mean, “Gutsoon”? What kind of name is that?

Also, I think they failed to realize that people who liked “Fist Of The North Star”… they were done with it. It lasted a long long time. By the time it was over, the last thing anybody wanted to see was more giant muscular people beating each other until their heads explode. Even the die hard FOTNS fans completely disavow the second half of the series, except for the one episode where the characters based on the popular “Junkyard Dogs” wrestling tag team meet their end in some fashion involving a nuclear device.

I think your assessment of Tetsuo Hara is just a tad harsh. It’s not really delusions of grandeur to say that Fist of the North Star is one of the greatest manga of all time. Regardless of one’s personal opinions on the work, from a pure numbers and especially influence perspective, it IS that and not in any “ironic” or “sarcastic” sense. Fist of the North Star was the first of the modern-era shonen action/adventure manga, the genre by which most of the most popular anime and manga titles worldwide belong to. Certainly, other titles preceded it but the conventions and character tropes established within it became the template by which contemporary hits such as Dragon Ball, Rurouni Kenshin, Naruto, Bleach, et al followed and continue to follow to this day. Raijin may be gone, and FotNS’s mainstream popularity has certainly passed, but even in 2010 they continue to make new merchandise, videogames, comics, and cartoons for this franchise from a quarter-century ago and enough people continue to buy them that they can justify making even more.

But you’re right in that Hara’s mistake WAS indeed the same mistake of the rest of the publication: the assumption that success in Japan would correspond to success in America. Anything related to Fist of the North Star–which Raijin put forth as their flagship title–had two things going against it: a decade of awful localization and the fact that unlike its modern-day successors, it came from a time where editors of “boy’s comics” weren’t overtly concerned with appealing to female readers the way they are today. In the case of the prequel series Fist of the Blue Sky, that wasn’t even an action series. It was a gangster drama set in the 1930s with substantially less fighting and bloodshed; the result of being a seinen (“men’s”) comic targeted at the 20+ crowd rather than one targeted towards boys 14 and under like the original.

Last year I had the pleasure of seeing Jonathan Tarbox, formerly of Raijin Comics, give some panels at a fan convention. The story he noted regarding the origin of Shonen Jump USA seems to be the opposite of what you listed. Perhaps this is independent of the order of press release, perhaps it’s bias towards one side, but he noted that the idea for Shonen Jump USA arose from a Japanese board meeting that basically amounted to “those defectors from us think THEY can launch a US manga anthology? Well, we’ll show them!” True or not, I imagine there’s still bad blood at the Jump offices for their former star editors and authors who left to start their own publishing company.

Great read, along with all of the other Manga Milestone posts.

Side note: When choosing tuxedos for my wedding, I brought a copy of Raijin Comics and showed them the tux from First President of Japan.

-J

Thanks for sharing this painful, but insightful read.