Category: Retailing

#6: Raijin Comics #46, by various. Published by Gutsoon Entertainment, July 2004

Upon the publication of the last issue of Raijin Comics, issue #46, in July of 2004, publisher Gutsoon Entertainment posted the following message to their website:

Dear RAIJIN COMICS readers,

Thank you for your enthusiastic support of RAIJIN COMICS. Over the past 18 months, we have tested the market to see how well a weekly and monthly manga magazine would fare with an American audience. Based on our research with readers, retailers and distributors, we have come to a conclusion – our publications, though appreciated by hard-core manga fans, are not penetrating a larger market.

In order for us to reach a broader market, RAIJIN COMICS, RAIJIN GRAPHIC NOVELS, and MASTER EDITION will be placed on hiatus for the time being. We will be taking time out to come up with ways to broaden the appeal of our publications, retooling stories and overall editorial content. RAIJIN COMICS Issue 46 and the June GRAPHIC NOVELS will be the last issue you will be printing.

All of our subscribers will be recieving a refund for the remainder of your balance with in the next few weeks. We are refunding you $3.95 for each issue owed after issue 46. For example, our charter members will receive a total of $7.90 for issues 47 & 48. You can see how many issues you had left by going to www.raijincomics.com and clicking on “my accounts”. Should you have have any questions and/or concerns with the amount, please contact our customer service department by e-mailing reimbursement@gutsoon.com or by calling 1.877.GUTSOON M~F from 10:00~ 7:00 PST.

Please note that the phone number and e-mail listed above are for orders and reimbursements only. To contact / comment regarding RAIJIN COMICS going on hiatus please e-mail raijinreaders@gutsoon.com

Again, we want to thank you for your support over the last 18 months, and look forward to the possibility of bringing you a more powerful, exciting RAIJIN COMICS in the near future.

Sincerely,

Horie Nobuhiko
Publisher

Michael Andres Palmieri
Executive Vice President

But there would be no reprieve or relaunch, the possibility of Raijin Comics or publisher Gutsoon returning never occurred. To anyone involved or anyone in the know, this was not surprising at all… but it did mark the first real failure of the manga boom of the 2000s.

Let’s go back about 2 years from that date, to the summer of 2002. Thanks to Tokyopop’s phenomenal bookstore success and some agressive moves by Viz, the field for translated Japanese comics–manga–began to open up considerably in North America. Sure, stalwarts like Tokyopop, Viz, and CPM had been producing material solidly for years at that point. But the rising awareness and success of manga, coupled with the virtually limitless supply of material that was available in Japan–literally MILLIONS of different series–inspired a number of new start-up companies and organizations. ComicsOne, a California-based publisher licensed a broad array of different manga, possibly one of the most eclectic line-ups of material in the business, including comedy works like Crayon Shin-Chan, Horror from Junji Ito and his three Tomie collections, historical fiction in the form of the full-colour Joan of Arc manga Joan, and then balanced it all by rescuing the licenses for popular Hong Kong action manhua. Studio Ironcat had been around for… a while (I honestly have no idea how long) and were just soliciting the first collection of the popular webcomics trip Megatokyo.  Popular anime publisher ADV was about 6 months away from the start of their manga line with titles that either inspired or were based on their popular anime, and had started making very obvious rumblings in that direction, with early titles already solicited. The success of manga had not gone unnoticed, and things were really starting to heat up.

That summer of 2002 saw the press release in Japan about Shueisha partnering with Viz to do an American version of Shonen Jump. Shortly thereafter, a company largely comprised of ex-Shonen Jump cartoonists named COAMIX announced their intention to do a magazine in North America as well.  Led by former Shonen Jump Editor in Chief Nobuhiko Horie and City Hunter creator Tsukasa Hojo, COAMIX got some funding together from both sides of the pacfic, and formed the company GUTSOON, to publish manga in North America. Like the Japanese Shonen Jump, their magazine would be weekly, and include a little bit of lifestyle content, and because the titles that they contained were popular in Japan, of COURSE they’d be popular in North America. They’d beat Shonen Jump at their own game! Out of this came Raijin Comix. A 200 page weekly manga anthology with cutting edge weekly video game news of japan, 16 pages in full colour. A big part of the initial investment in the magazine came from video game system manufacturer and game publisher SEGA, who were looking for an “in” to North American culture to give them an advantage in the video game console wars (Between Sega’s Dreamcast, Nintendo’s N64, and Sony’s Playstation). Already you can see that Raijin, as much as it attempted to sell the product, it also was trying to very ambitiously sell the lifestyle that went along with it. It’s important to note that this is the exact tactic that Shonen Jump used as well, though they employed many more partnerships, and their ace-in-the-hole was getting on TV in a prime spot, right from the get-go.

Once it was announced that Raijin was launching in North America, well, I have to admit I was personally pretty excited. A weekly manga magazine! It was everything I wanted from the manga boom–mature titles delivered at a fast pace, at a decent price-point. What gave me pause even then, though, was that the magazine was undergoing significant format changes after its announcement, and it seems like all of the format changes came at the request of one of their biggest partners, Diamond Comics Distributors. Between their initial announcement and solicitation, Diamond managed to talk them into a massive format change, with the video-game content being spun off into a separate magazine, known initially as “Fujin” but then retitled “RGA” (Raijin Game & Anime) between solicitation and its arrival in stores. RGA ran a buck an issue, came out on the same weekly schedule as Raijin, and was sold in bundles of 10 that direct market retailers could buy separately. This would get the price of the weekly magazine down to $4.95 (the same price as Shonen Jump) from its initially planned price of $6.95. They also begged–BEGGED-Raijin not to do a weekly magazine, as Diamond, frankly, isn’t very good at distributing weekly product. But when the core fundamental of your business plan is “be there every week”, well, there are some things you can’t change. I think the first missed-ship week came 17 weeks in, with 2 issues shipping on the following week. All of it Diamond’s fault of course, but when you’re not a big front-of-catalogue publisher, there’s only so much attention that they can give your work.

I had been retailing comics, more-or-less constantly, for about 6 or 7 years by the time Raijin was almost ready to drop in North America. I had ordered and sold the very first Tokyopop products, and seen the steady rise of interest and sales in manga. I was as much of a retail expert on manga as anyone could be, at that point, at least in the direct market, the network of comic book specialty stores where (then) the vast majority of comics sales were made. And I was mouthy on the internet, particularly the extremely popular Warren Ellis Forum, and so I was sought out by a good, well-meaning dude from Raijin to bounce some stuff off of me. I was flattered (who wouldn’t be?) and I gave my advice freely and openly. Not all of it was listened to, but in the end (and almost entirely uncredited) there’s a lot of me in Raijin magazine.

As I mentioned during the entry on Shonen Jump, the initial chapters of manga are often much longer than the standard chapters, and so it took the first 3 issues of the magazine to serialize all of the “launch” titles of the work. So on that note, the titles that “launched” in Raijin were: The hyper-violent The Fist Of The Blue Sky by Tetsuo Hara, the sequel to The Fist Of The North Star; the first sports-manga translated into English, Slam Dunk, by Takehiko Inoue; the ultra-80s action/sex/comedy police series City Hunter by Hojo Tsukasa; the over-the-top violent action/ecchi series Bomber Girl by Makoto Niwano, a series so borderline-porn that its sequel was just all-out actual porn (and thus never released in North America); the ultra-violent underground fight-comic Baki The Grappler by Itagaki Keisuke; the surprising and mature contemporary political fiction series The First President Of Japan by Yoshiki Hidaka and Ryuji Tsugihara; and Guardian Angel Getten by Minene Sakurano, about a boy and a guardian angel that’s could charitably be described as “regurgitated”. The slogan on the first issue said, The Dream Team Has Come!, which I hope helps you understand the massive hubris and ego involved in this project… These guys really thought they were bringing the greatest manga in the medium to North America, and that success would greet them warmly.

The Dream Team, by the way, was very very manly, from the manliest period in manga history (the mid 80s and early 90s), and The Dream Team arrived at a time when the most popular manga in the industry were 1. Pokemon, 2. Sailor Moon, 3. Dragon Ball, and 4. Cardcaptor Sakura. Right off the bat, you can see that this unique, innovative, product was going to be swimming upstream, right? Well compound that with the fact that the magazine was going to be printed (much like Shonen Jump USA) entirely right-to-left in the Japanese orientation. A handy rule of thumb that we’ve learned in manga, particularly in publishing, is that the older the intended audience of a translated work, the more likely it should be “flipped” into the North American orientation, because old people hate learning new things. Raijin was a pretty-firm 16-and-up kinda magazine (and frequently even a little bit more violent/sexy than that), at a time when manga was finding a new, YOUNG audience. Even amongst the most popular fighting manga, the differences between Raijin and its competitors would be pronounced; in Dragonball Z when one character punched another, they’d go flying through the air, maybe knock down a mountain, maybe even spit a little blood, but then get back up and give as good as they got. In The Fist of the Blue Sky when a character got punched, his head exploded. It was for grown-ups, grown-ups who were going to have to essentially learn another language. American grown-ups.

That’s the other big thing about the magazine: It was called Raijin Comics. Not Raijin Manga. Or even just “Raijin”. Raijin was not aimed at manga fans in North America. It was aimed at “comics” fans, the folks reading superheroes primarily. It took the message of Tokyopop–that Western fans are more open to manga now–and decided that meant publishing manga explicitly for existing comics fans, who were male, 18-49, and white. Don’t believe me? I’ve got a great anecdote for you: Fist Of The North Star co-creator Tetsuo Hara was (and is) convinced that his landmark series is one of the greatest of all time. All. Time. It’s a post-apocalyptic fantasy epic where dudes hit each other until they explode, and women are cann0n-fodder… at best. It’s not without its over-the-top, head-punchy charms, but… But Hara isn’t hearing that of course. He was (reportedly) very unhappy by the series’ first sojourns to North America, where the anime tv series was cut to hell and repackaged as a movie, and where the manga was released small, and flipped, and incomplete. He became convinced that the hideously violent and misogynistic series could be a success in North America if only it were printed bigger, and in colour. So at a time when manga was finding massive, massive success by going as small and cheap as possible, Hara decreed that North Star would be big, bigger even than North American comics (that was an important part, bigger because his work was better), with brand new digital colour and  on nice paper, in the original Japanese reading method… at a cover price of $18 a volume. He had produced a classic, and he wanted it to compete with American classics, despite the fact that American Superhero Fans are more-or-less finding what they want out of American Superhero Comics, and that the entire industry was going a different way, building a new audience and not relying on selling more product to the old one. They managed to crank out 9 volumes of the remastered North Star in the 18 months they were in business, but it’s safe to say it did not set the manga world on fire. Neither fish-nor-fowl, the series didn’t look like popular manga, it was in colour and expensive making it weird and inauthentic for the die-hard manga fan, and superhero fans? Well, let’s just say that they’re still not entirely sold on buying “original graphic novels” almost 10 years later. This is just an anecdote, like I said, but its emblematic of the entire problem with Raijin; it was a grand, important vision for specific manga works appearing in North America, that absolutely could not see the forest for the trees.

The magazine failed. Slowly, surely, it failed. The calls from the folks at Raijin asking for advice got longer, and especially towards the end, my suggestions for the magazine were being incorporated fast and furious! The addition, at the end, of Japanese language lessons via manga? Me. With cheap trades coming out right on the heels of the serialization, they needed a reason, any reason, for folks to pick up the magazine, and material that wouldn’t be collected was it. I might’ve even been the one to suggest more short, one-shot manga that would be a satisfying read for someone picking up the magazine and not just getting stories mid-way through their serialization, which they did with the mountain-climbing manga they had…. But anyway, the magazine flailed, mixing manly manga with vague pseudo-porn, a couple of strong features, and then in a last-ditch-effort to attract the still-burgeoning audience for much younger shonen and shoujo manga, adding the treacly-sweet “Bow Wow Wata”  shoujo series into the magazine… right next to hyper-violent Baki The Grappler and the terrorist action manga Revenge of Mouflon. I’d ask, rhetorically, “What the hell were they thinking?” but I know what they were thinking: “Make the magazine more attractive to the new manga fans, so that they’ll discover that the manga we’re publishing is SO MUCH BETTER!” Seriously. 20-year old action manga was simply waiting for fans of Fruits Basket to discover it.

Oh, I should fill in some of the gaps for you here. In addition to a weekly magazine, Raijin Comics, the 16-page videogame and anime suppliment RGA, and the bimonthly release of Fist of the North Star in colour, publisher Gutsoon began to release Tokyopop-sized, black and white collections of the manga serialized in Raijin Comics for just $9.95 a book. They were, unsurprisingly, pretty popular, fitting in nicely with the masses and masses of other manga being released at the time. Solid, respectable sales in the bookstores, by my recollection, and we did fairly well with them at The Beguiling. In individual collected form, the diversity (and honestly, the strangeness) of a line comprised of older-shonen and seinen manga on a variety of subjects? Well that was a strength, as new audiences that weren’t being served by the onslaught of contemporary shonen and shoujo material could find something more to their tastes, whether that was over-the-top action manga or a political thriller, without being subjected to Getten, Bow Wow Wata, or Bomber Girl. Or vice versa, I suppose? It was no Tokyopop revolution, or anywhere near the staggering sales and tie-in popularity Viz was receiving from Shonen Jump magazine, but it was their first real success.

I will say that the most realistic part of their business plan was that they anticipated a weekly circulation of approximately 15,000 copies, which was not unreasonable, particularly in hindsight when Shonen Jump launched with a circulation of over 300,000 copies of the first issue. 15,000 copy sales would’ve placed them in the same neighbourhood as CrossGen. Presumably at least, they had worked out a way that they would be profitable on a weekly circulation of 15k. According to the sales that I can find, issues 5-8 of the series averaged a sell-in of about 2100 copies through Diamond, coming in very near to the bottom of the top 300 sales chart that Diamond publishes every month. Shonen Jump’s first issue came in at around 8500 copies through the direct market, a far, far cry from its total sales. Raijin’s staff at the time touted their victory over SJ during their respective first months, because the combined sales of all 4 weekly issues beat the first-issue sales of Shonen Jump. Spin is a powerful thing, and at that point, they needed whatever they could get. I should be fair and say that they did have a newstand presence and a subscription base, but as evidenced by their going-out-of-business letter at the top, apparently neither of those numbers were anything to crow about.

Sales declined as the months wore on. RGA lasted 20 issues (and 20 weeks) before being folded back into Raijin. In October of 2003, the magazine went from a weekly to a monthly (with no commensurate increase in size but a new cover price of $5.95, a buck more than its closest competition or its previous pricepoint). The last weekly issue of the magazine, #36, seemed to come in at about 1500 copies through Diamond, and from #37 it didn’t appear to chart in the top 300 whatsoever.

The last year of Raijin, I honestly don’t know that much about it. I’d lost touch with most of the people involved, and it was clear that no one was having a good time of it there. Worse, it became pretty clear that they really didn’t seem to know what to do, and despite a huge launch budget and lots of bravado, maybe they never really did. Their perceived strengths when launching became hindrances, particularly being tied to a monthly magazine format that hamstrung their graphic novel program, that needed material released quickly in order to solicit the (to my knowledge) profitable trade program. I don’t think it ever occurred to anyone involved with the magazine that it wouldn’t be a huge success, given the stunning popularity of the core titles Fist, City Hunter, and Slam Dunk. Raijin and Gutsoon’s greatest failings, aside from hubris, was an inability to adapt to a marketplace undergoing a massive change and, considering how much _they’d_ changed their plans in the 6 months between announcing the book and the first issues arriving on stands, you woulda thought that change would be one of their biggest strengths.

The serialization of Raijin Comics ended with the 46th issue. It came out a few weeks late, and then the company disappeared. While a few trade paperbacks did manage to make it to store shelves past the end of the monthly magazine (basically, anything that was already at the printers), Raijin Comics #46 marked the end of Gutsoon, and was the first real casualty of the manga boom. True to their word though, they behaved honourably towards their subscribers and sent them cheques for the remainders of their subscriptions, and did their best to close up shop neatly and cleanly.

In the years that followed, many [overly] ambitious publishers would crash and burn. The biggest was probably ADV Manga, a subsidiary of anime publisher AD Vision. With a stunning amount of hubris, the company which had, to then, released a number of moderately-successful titles tying-into their anime line decided to up the ante considerably in 2004, releasing dozens of brand-new and largely mediocre anime-tie-ins and various manwha titles, all in the space of just a few short months. Tokyopop and Viz had ramped up their lines considerably, releasing over a dozen manga a month, each. ADV emulated their output but not any of their acumen (or years of gradual building), and basically dumped tons of product onto the market with no support or foresight. They were convinced, somehow, that manga was a license to print money. It didn’t matter if it was a good manga, like Tactics, or a bad manga, like First King Adventure, it was just dozens of first and second volumes dumped on already straining-at-the-seams bookstore and comic shop manga sections, and something had to give. Most of their line was cancelled after 1 or 2 volumes at the end of 2004 and the beginning of 2005; ADV re-launched in 2006, only to stop publishing entirely by the end of 2008. Companies like Be Beautiful, DramaQueen, Broccoli, Dr. Master, Infinity, and more splashed onto the scene and then disappeared completely in the past decade, and industry stalwarts like Tokyopop suffered through some tough times, with Every Single Person I Know In The Industry predicting their imminent demise, monthly, if they offered any opinion at all.

In writing this I tried to remove myself a little from the proceedings, and view the history of Raijin through press releases, reviews, message board chatter, and more, as much as from my own remembrances of the time. But I’ll own up to the fact that, despite everything, I was pretty close to the situation and didn’t have the warmest feelings for Raijin Editor Jake Tarbox towards the end (or afterwards), and that this entry out of all of them could be the closest to flat-out wrong. But until proven otherwise, this is what went down with North America’s first and only weekly manga magazine 7 years ago, one of the biggest launches I’ve ever seen, and one of the most spectacular publishing failures I’ve ever witnessed. To Raijin: It would’ve been nice if more publishers had learned from your mistakes.

Other Resources:

Raijin Archive at AnimeNewsNetwork: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/manga.php?id=2016
Raijin Comics Website (Wayback Machine): http://web.archive.org/web/20040626023411/http://www.raijincomics.com/

-o+O+0-

Coming soon! Parts 7, 8, 9, and 10.

– Christopher

#5. Buddha Volume 1: Kapilavastu HC, by Osamu Tezuka. Published by Vertical Inc., October 2003.

When I think of how and why Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha was a milestone of the last decade, I come up with a laundry list of ideas. It’s incredibly tempting to just jot them down, point form, and let it wash over you. But I am a writer, and so I will write about it a little.

In the summer of 2003, my mind was quite happily blown by a book called Yukiko’s Spinach, a French/Japanese hybrid graphic novel by Frederic Boilet, published in English by the UK outfit Fanfare. Yukiko’s Spinach is either autobiography or drawn so closely from events true-to-life that it doesn’t matter if it’s not; it’s about a French comics artist in a doomed relationship with a Japanese girl as they both live together in Tokyo. It is heavily photo referenced, with strong black lines and shadows over top of blurred-out photographs and greytones, giving the entire effort an ethereal quality. It was printed on heavy, glossy paper, and weighed in at a little over 200 pages. The cover was on thick, coated-matte stock, and it had French Flaps! It cost like $28 or something (Canadian). It was manga, but also not manga, and it dealt with an adult relationship that slowly unraveled over its length, in a matter-of-fact way. It, as an object, and as a story, was revelatory to me. Fanfare had introduced the world to “Nouvelle Manga”, a movement of work that sought to blend French, Japanese, and American comics ideals to create something unique, exemplifying the strengths of all three, for a more mature and sophisticated audience. Fanfare would follow Yukiko’s Spinach up over the next 7 years by producing, book-for-book, the single strongest line of material out of any publisher working in English. I mean, it helps if you only do a book (or occasionally two) a year, but they’ve got maybe one book in their library that I’d consider mediocre, and everything else is either above-average or outright excellent. Drop as much money as you can acquiring their backlist.

That said, the impact of Buddha blows it all away.

Osamu Tezuka is called “The God of Manga”. Sure, that’s over-the-top, and particularly coming from a western point of view, particularly in 2003 when the sum-total of his work in English was a handful of volumes of Astro Boy, the may-as-well-be-out-of-print Adolf and a couple of the early volumes of Phoenix. The title just seemed… quaint. Like “Oh, yeah, the Japanese really love this Tezuka guy, he made all those kids comics like Astro Boy and Kimba, but whatever.” And you’d hear from people that he had drawn tens of thousands of pages of manga, had over 700 different works, and it was like “yeah, we get it, he’s popular in Japan” and that was that. You couldn’t tell people, and the material wasn’t available to show them either. I mean, I accepted it on faith, but that’s all it was. Astro Boy‘s great, but…

When it was announced that a young publisher from outside of the comics market would be releasing an 8 volume hardcover series comprising well over 2000 pages of adult-focussed material by Tezuka, it was jaw-dropping. First and foremost, it was a ‘real’ publisher doing the publishing. Vertical was known for producing English-language translations of Japanese novels, with striking cover designs by graphic design superstar Chip Kidd. They were not Tokyopop, or Viz, or even Marvel or DC. These were people in the business of putting out great looking English editions of foreign work, and they decided that was going to include manga as well. They also decided that it would include the most important manga they could find, and that meant Tezuka. But how do you choose which Tezuka manga out of tens of thousands of pages and over 700 different works…? You go for the one with the grandest scope of course, and that’s the one that details the life story of The Buddha. Now that’s a deity with name-recognition!

So the whole summer, the industry (and manga fans like myself) are buzzing. Buddha! Buddha! Buddha! Chip Kidd! Buddha! It was exciting. Not just because it was a ‘real’ publisher publishing manga (and thereby giving the whole medium of comics recognition), not just because Chip Kidd had designed beautiful books, more beautiful than any other manga title (or almost any non-manga title) published to date. Not even because this was the first major comics biography of a religious figure, and the book would doubtless find an audience far otuside the standard confines of the comics industry, acting as a spearhead into the little-travelled world of Comics For Grown-Ups. I mean, sure, every single one of those things happened. But that wasn’t why we were buzzing… It was because now we (manga fans) could finally prove the worth of Osamu Tezuka to the doubters, to our friends, to anyone who would listen (whether they cared or not).

Buddha is not Tezuka’s strongest work, nor is it my favourite by him. I’m partial to Phoenix Volume 4. My friend Jason (and the rest of the world) seems to think it’s Phoenix Volume 5 that’s the pinnacle of English-language Tezuka work. A few Johnny-come-latelys even prefer Ode To Kirihito or MW. But Buddha? Buddha was more than ‘enough’. It’s epic.

The first volume of Buddha does not contain The Buddha, except as a baby, born in the last 10 pages of the volume. The entire first volume of the book is prologue; developing the setting, the characters, the tone, hinting at the plot. A number of fictional characters are created to explain the caste system that gripped India and South Asia, to create sympathy and understanding, to ease readers into an unfamiliar world. Lots happens of course, wars, love, betrayal. It’s a great book all on its own with a complete narrative arc, fully-developed characters, a tear-jerker ending, the whole thing.  250 pages. Prologue.

The most important thing about Buddha, the switch it flipped in the minds of everyone who read it, or even heard about it? It had a larger scope, a higher ambition, than 99% of comics released before it. And it was by Osamu Tezuka. And it was originally published in 1972.

Buddha cemented the name of Tezuka in the minds of the denizens of the North American comics industry, but also the wider literary world, which was just beginning to dabble in reviewing and discussing these grown-up comic books. Buddha was irresistible in that regard, as the subject (Buddhism!) was hot! Buddha was touted as a great “way in” to understanding Buddhism, and with the review came the attendant praise and acclaim for Tezuka, further raising his profile. Best of all? North America loves memoir and biography, and looking at the graphic critical darlings of the last 10 years like Persepolis, Fun Home, Blankets, etc., it’s easy to see how something like Buddha would fit in nicely.

There were drawbacks of course, weaknesses in the work. The biggest is that, despite being far ahead of its time in 1972, social mores had changed in 30 years (and Japan and America never quite had the same social mores to begin with…), and while the work wasn’t as problematic in that regard as other earlier Tezuka works, even as a historical work some of its depictions were dated and off-putting. Buddha was also one of Tezuka’s earliest attempts to do work for grownups, and although it does have a depth and maturity Tezuka as an author was still preoccupied with the idea of his audience of young children discovering this work, and so he would constantly diffuse scenes that got too dark, depressing, or serious with slapstick humour or deformed characters, occasionally deflating a scene entirely. The length of the work, one of its most monumental assets, was also considered a detriment by many. 8 volumes at $24.95 is $200! That’s a lot of scratch to drop to get one comic book story. And The Buddha isn’t even in the first one!

The series did well though. It sold out in hardcover, multiple printings on the first 6 volumes too. It was a critical darling. And it was the first high-profile, successful, mature manga. Fanfare UK was already moving to publish more mature works, and mature, outsider, and underground manga had been published by Viz, Blast Books, and Fantagraphics, for years at that point. But none of it was able to break through, out of the indifference of the general market who wanted their manga shonen (or shoujo) and exciting and pretty, or else were completely disinterested in manga altogether (often with prejudice). Buddha created a market for manga for grown-ups, when nothing else to that point had worked. That’s pretty goddamned amazing.

It almost didn’t get finished, by the way. Right around volume 5 or 6 there was a pretty big delay in the publishing. Vertical was having severe cashflow problems, it was all over the book industry trade papers, and it was joked (meanly!) that we might never find out if The Buddha would attain enlightenment or not! Vertical had another mis-step when they solicited and began promoting inexpensive softcover editions of the series–in the middle of the hardcover release! Nothing kills a serialization faster than being told “Hey there’s a cheaper version coming out in a few months! Less than half the price!” In Vertical’s defence, the $9.95 paperback editions were going to be differently broken-up than the HCs, 12 volumes total instead of 8, I think (matching one of the Japanese releases). And they were in a cash crunch, one that some quick paperback money would have helped to alleviate. But yeah, let’s just say it’s a very good thing indeed that they decided to hold off on that release entirely, opting to do the series in an 8 volume softcover edition beginning in 2006… after the end of the hardcover releases.

Since then, Vertical has released a dozen more books by Osamu Tezuka, including Ode To Kirihito, MW, Apollo’s Song, the 3 volume Dororo, and 9 volumes of a 13-volume release of Tezuka’s second-most popular creation, Black Jack. Viz finished their release of Phoenix with all 12 volumes in print for a brief, fleeting moment, before volume 2 went out of print at the end of 2009 (hopefully only temporarily). Dark Horse released a number of very early works by Tezuka, more historical curiosities than anything else, including Metropolis, The Lost World, and Next World 1 & 2. DMP jumped in in 2009 with Swallowing The Earth, possibly the first outright bad Tezuka comic released into English. That’s it’s own sort of milestone I guess, but not one I’ll be noting here. Those and the afformentioned Astro Boy and Adolf make up the entirety of Tezuka’s works translated into English, about 70 trade paperbacks out of hundreds and hundreds in print in Japanese. Hopefully, with more to come.

Art: Top: Buddha Volume 1: Kapilavastu Hardcover Cover Image, published by Vertical Inc. Art by Osamu Tezuka, design by Chip Kidd. Middle: The spines of Buddha Volume 1-8 formed a larger image of the 3 periods of The Buddha’s life. Art by Tezuka, design by Kidd. Bottom: An original page of art from Buddha, by Osamu Tezuka. Taken at the Tezuka Museum. Photo by Christopher Butcher.

-o+O+o-

Tomorrow: #6, #7, and #8!

– Christopher!

#3: Shonen Jump #1. November 2002. Published by Viz.

I kept going back and forth on this one, trying to decide whether November’s Shonen Jump Volume 1, Issue 1, was more of a milestone than Raijin Comics #1, released a month later. In the end, Raijin was an innovative and exciting product, but it’s most notable for failing. Shonen Jump is still going strong 8 years later, with a monthly circulation of 200,000+ readers. So let’s talk about Shonen Jump instead.

In November of 2002, the industry was not exactly hurting for manga anthologies. In Japan, anthologies are plentiful–it’s very rare for a work to be released in a long-form edition without having been serialized first. In fact hundreds of different series are serialized in different magazines each year, and the king of the heap with the highest circulation is Weekly Shonen Jump. While Tokyopop had got its start in the anthologies MIXX, SMILE, and TOKYOPOP, and Viz had Manga Vizion and my beloved Pulp, by the end of 2002 all of those magazines had bitten the dust. Sure, Dark Horse’s Super Manga Blast and Viz’s own Animerica Extra continued to bring manga to the masses with their 100 page, $8 price points, but the industry was headed a different direction. With the popularity of the smaller, cheaper manga that Tokyopop was pushing (and Viz had yet to embrace…), and Tokyopop’s then-recent decision to end serialization of most of  all of their comic books and go straight-to-trade, combined with Dark Horse announcing that it was going to be releasing Tezuka’s Astro Boy as a series of graphic novels at that same $9.95 price point, it looked like the sun was finally setting on serialized manga.

But. In June of 2002, Viz announced that it would be partnering with Japanese publishing giant Shueisha to bring their flagship manga anthology, Shonen Jump, to North America. It flew in the face of the newly burgeoning market. While Viz had experience publishing anthologies at this time, it was seen as a bold–even wrong-headed move by most. Particularly as Viz’s version of Shonen Jump would be monthly, and Shueisha’s was weekly. Fans decried the pacing, saying that favourite series like Naruto and One Piece would lag further and further behind their Japanese serializations (of, if only they knew…). And who needed anthologies anyway, why not just go straight to the collected edition?

The reasoning was pretty obvious. Viz was going to use the strongest tools in their arsenal, the absolute biggest and most popular manga in Japan, to make an offensive outside of the comic book distribution system into… well, everywhere else. They anchored the book with the still incredibly popular Dragonball Z. They partnered with The Cartoon Network, filling the book with series that also had anime airing on TV (or were about to!). They had Yu-Gi-Oh, the manga that inspired the hit collectible card game, and they bound a rare card in the first issue to goose sales. They worked their asses off to get it good distribution, working well-ahead with Diamond and (the now defunct) Suncoast media stores, where tons of manga was already being sold. They got great newstand presence too…!

All of that added up to first issue-sales of over 300,000 copies, which effectively silenced all those critics I mentioned in the preceding two paragraphs.

First chapters of manga are usually double-sized, 48 pages or so, to give readers a more thorough introduction to the story. Because of this, the first issue of Shonen Jump only featured 5 of its planned 7 “launch” series, Akira Toriyama’s Dragonball Z and Sand Land, Yoshihiro Togashi’s YuYu Hakusho, Echiro Oda’s One Piece, and Kazuki Takahashi’s Yu Gi Oh. The second issue introduced the world to Masahi Kishimoto’s Naruto, and the third issue gave the world Hiroyuki Takei’s Shaman King. Within 3 months, the official launch line-up of Shonen Jump was completed. If you look at the titles there, more than half of them were amongst the most popular and bestselling manga of the past 10 years. Naruto and One Piece still top the charts. All in one magazine.

The kicker? Shonen Jump magazine was available  every month, on every newstand, more than 300 pages at a go, for just $4.95. It immediately changed the game for manga pricing, but was also massively successful in attracting superhero readers like John Jakala, who published this infamous blog post, which I have reprinted in its entirety:

The Weak American Conversion Rate

After the last couple long posts, I figured I’d do something light. So here’s a comparison of what $60 will get you in manga versus American comics:

Gee, I wonder why young kids are flocking to manga?

(In case you’re wondering, that’s 12 issues of Viz’s manga anthology Shonen Jump (with a $4.95 cover price) on the left and 24 issues of various American comics at $2.50 a pop on the right .)

– John Jakala, October 30th 2003

It’s even worse now that American comics are $3.99 a pop. Funnier though; that stack of comics would be half that size.

Viz had beaten Tokyopop at their own game, and produced much, much-better looking material doing it. Granted, it accomplished this through massive investment by the largest publishing company in Japan, investment that eventually led to Shueisha and rival pub Shogakukan purchasing Viz outright… and man was that a game-changer or what? It allowed for a massive reinvestment in their line, huge expansion, and a radical shake-up of a company that had advanced only very incrementally over its time in the publishing game. And THAT came out of Shonen Jump too.

So lets see, our milestone has opened up hundreds of new outlets for manga sales, introduced tens of thousands of new readers to the medium of comics (manga), become the best-selling comic book since the speculator boom (and bust) of the early 90s, and was the first step to Viz being the publishing juggernaut it is today. Not too shabby. It also ended up inspiring the similar just-for-girls anthology Shojo Beat a few years later, putting comics explicitly for girls and young women back onto the newstand, from which they’d been absent (save Archie…) for years. Sadly, Shojo Beat was cancelled in 2009, but the trade paperback line that bears its name is still going strong, with some of the bestselling manga in the industry published under the Shojo Beat banner.

-o+O+o-

#4. Inu Yasha Volume 13, by Rumiko Takahasi. Published by Viz. April 2003. Solicited January 2003.

Then, one day, right in the middle of their serialization of the very-popular Inu Yasha graphic novels, Viz changed the format of their manga. Inu Yasha Volume 12 was the standard 6″ x 9″ format Viz manga had been using for years. It also retailed for $15.95, $6 more per book than a comperable series from another publisher. Then the next volume was completely different. It was terrifying.

By April of 2003, Tokyopop had given up on single issue comic books AND anthologies altogether, and increased their manga trim size to the now-standard 5.5″ x 7.5″. They were going straight to graphic novel format with shoujo series like Cardcaptor Sakura, Happy Mania, Marmalade Boy, and Tokyo Mew Mew, shonen manga like Cowboy Bebop, Dragon Knights, Luipin III, Rave, and Rebound, and even Seinen (young men’s) manga like Chobits and Initial D. In April of 2003 Tokyopop released 12 volumes of new material, par-for-the-course for them. A new publisher named ComicsOne has also released a bunch of manga in “The Tokyopop Format”. Dark Horse serialized Astro Boy trade paperbacks in “The Tokyopop Format”. And just like that, an entire trim-size of book became named after one company, and it stayed that way through most of the decade. The Tokyopop Format.

(Interestingly, the Tokyopop format doesn’t actually correspond to any sort of page size used in manga in Japan, or any size ratio. It’s actually a really awkward size for publishers, too long and thin for the original manga pages, which means that either more artwork gets chopped off on the sides, or there’s blank-space on the top or bottom, or the artwork is “smushed” to fit.)

When Viz announced that they were moving all of their books to a new trim size, they never came right out  and called it “The Tokyopop Format”, they couldn’t, but yeah, they lost that particular battle.

But when Inu Yasha Volume 13 came out, it became apparent that they were looking to win the war.

The book dropped at Tokyopop size, yes, but also with a radically redesigned book-cover treatment, cutting edge for comics at the time. AND it landed at just $8.95, a buck cheaper than the new $9.99 standard. Take a look, side by side, at the covers of Inu Yasha 2 first edition and new edition… It was like Viz had finally woken their design dept. up out of the 1980s, and were ready to COMPETE:

Slick, eh?

But this was just the harbinger. You see, Inu Yasha Volume 13 was the first new Viz manga to be released in the new format, but Viz hadn’t decided to just move forward with this new format. No, they were moving backwards as well, and Viz had (and still has) the largest manga backlist in the industry. Inu Yasha Volume 13 started a tidal-wave; a flood. A flood of what immediately became known as “Old Format Viz”.

“Old Format Viz” was basically the comics equivalent of herpes: no one wanted it, but chances are everyone had it, in one form or another, and would try anything to get rid of it.

“But wait,” you ask. “Why would everyone try to get rid of differently-sized printings of perfectly good manga,  some of which was even released the very-same-month as Inu Yasha 13?” That’s a very good question. The answer is simple: I’m a bit of an unreliable narrator.

Y’see, Inu Yasha Volume 13 was solicited in January of 2003 and it was the first manga to be solicited in the new format, and it was the first brand new Viz manga to be released in the new format. But a few weeks before it appeared in stores, Viz had rush-solicited and then released this:

FEB03 2196 DRAGONBALL VOL 1 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2197 DRAGONBALL VOL 2 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2198 DRAGONBALL VOL 3 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2199 DRAGONBALL VOL 4 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2200 DRAGONBALL VOL 5 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2201 DRAGONBALL VOL 6 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2202 DRAGONBALL VOL 7 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2206 DRAGONBALL Z VOL 1 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2207 DRAGONBALL Z VOL 2 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2208 DRAGONBALL Z VOL 3 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2209 DRAGONBALL Z VOL 4 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2210 DRAGONBALL Z VOL 5 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2211 DRAGONBALL Z VOL 6 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95
FEB03 2212 DRAGONBALLZ VOL 7 TP 2ND ED (C: 3) $7.95

Viz had announced that it wouldn’t just be their new books, going forward, that would be in the new format. They’d be going back to press on more-or-less their entire backlist over the next 24 months, and re-releasing it all in the new format, at a new pricepoint of between $8 and $10! A new pricepoint that was between 33% and %50 cheaper than the previous versions had been, in a more popular, better-designed format. They released 14 volumes of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z manga on the same day, then, the single-largest release of English language manga at the same time in the history of the medium. Oh, and Viz had basically just bricked all of their existing stock on store shelves.

The people who suffered the most? Direct Market comic book stores who were buying the product non-returnably from Diamond. You see, if Borders or Barnes & Noble stopped selling the old format Inu Yasha volumes because it was now being released in a shiny new edition for half the price, they could just send the one that didn’t sell back to Viz and get a refund. Direct Market stores, who had stocked and sold manga for years? Almost all of their Viz product was ‘dead’. Overnight. They were not happy, Diamond wasn’t going to take the product back, and Viz never offered. Even at phenomenally deep discounts (and really, they STARTED at 50% off on Old Format Viz), most buyers didn’t care, they didn’t want the books that “didn’t match” the rest of their collections. Manga fans are both fickle and OCD; it’s a deadly combination. If you were an optimist-type retailer, you looked at it as a long-haul thing, clearing out shelf-worn copies of books and improving the overall health and longevity of manga in your store, even if it cost you a bunch of money. If you were a pessimist, you stopped carrying manga.

Actually, heh, you shoulda heard the Ranma 1/2 fans who were more than half-way through the series in the Old Format before being told, flat-out, that the series would _not_ be finished in that format and that they’d have to switch to the new one. And re-buy 20 or 21 volumes of a book that they’d already spent nearly $400 collecting if they wanted the spines to match up. Sucks to be a Ranma fan. Or an OCD one anyway.

In the first 3 months of the Viz revamp, Viz had re-released nearly 40 volumes in new editions, and changed over the vast majority of their line to the new Tokyopop format. The only hold-outs were series that would not be getting reprints, like Kia Asamiya’s Steam Detectives, or mature works and special projects like Vagabond by Takehiko Inoue. The writing was on the wall: the old format books were dead, and you were only hanging onto them until the new ones came out. If that long.

In the end of course, the format was a godsend and we all made so much fucking money off those books over the last decade. As this was happening, I had started working at The Beguiling and doing some of the ordering and shelving, including these books, and was just marvelling with every announcement about the interesting times we lived in. I even picked up all of the Dragon Ball volumes, now that they were uncensored again, to treat myself.

And it all started (more or less) with Inu Yasha, the harbinger of the most massive change that manga saw in the last decade: the move en masse to cheaper, more attractive formats that changed the way we look at comics. Tokyopop may have invented it, but Viz used it better.

-o+O+o-

Tomorrow: Parts 5 & 6!

– Christopher

There were more manga released each month in 2009 than were released in the entirety of the year 2000. The growth of Japanese-originating comics in the North American comics industry has been phenomenal over the last ten years, with a massive manga boom that never busted (plateaued though), an explosion of material for every gender, every age group, and nearly-every interest. While there are still readers to be initiated and battles to be fought, the preceding decade saw manga arrive in North America; its decades of scouting and waiting paid off in spades for quite a few publishers… and dashed others against the rocks.

There have been thousands of manga released in North America over the past 10 years, but I believe the following 10(-ish) manga were the milestones of the decade, the most important works to be released in English. Depending on how detailed (or long) I wanted this article to go, I could pick 25, 50, 100 manga that serve as milestones, indicative of the industry and the medium and what was and whats to come. But I think I’ve picked 10 manga that paint the most vivid picture of the medium so I’m going to go with those–part of the fun of making lists like these is seeing where opinions differ, and what’s important to the writer (me!).

-> Unfortunately I went on entirely too long about my first two choices, and so I’ve had to break this up into a number of parts. I’m loathe to do that, but I feel like 2000-word chunks is a good length to read a bunch of manga history. So here’s book 1 and 2, chronologically, and hopefully we’ll keep pace for the rest of the week.

Feel free to leave a comment if you like, and without further ado let me present to you The 10 Manga That Changed Comics in the last decade, #1 and #2:

#1: Dragonball #1 (pre-2000) / Dragonball Volume 1 (August 2000). By Akira Toriyama, published by Viz.

In the waning days of 1999 manga sparked the first fires of potential controversy with its march into North America. The manga version of Akira Toriyama’s popular Dragonball series had started a few years earlier, in the quaint (but then-standard) format of 40 page single-issue comics, each reprinting a chapter (or two) of the Japanese comics phenomenon in English language, for the first time. The series were among the first to be released “unflipped” (or in their original Japanese orientation of right-to-left) by Viz, after it was proven the format would be popular thanks to unflipped releases of the Neon Genesis Evangelion manga by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. It was selected because, sure, it’s a manga phenomenon and was incredibly popular everywhere in the world, but also because it was really good, and that was the REASON it was popular everywhere else in the world. The Dragon Ball manga are hilarious, have fantastic fight scenes, great art, and present a fully-realized sci-fi world that any kid (or the young-at-heart) would love to hang out in. It’s top-notch comics, by one of the best creators in the world.

Oh, and, ALSO because Viz was in the midst of a boom of licensing bucks thanks to BIG! POKEMON! DOLLARS! (they had the rights to the million-selling Pokemon manga series) and the Dragonball and Dragonball Z (a sequel) anime adaptations were doing very well on U.S. Television.

The heavily-edited anime adaptations, I should add.

The manga, owing to the creator’s wishes and the general feeling amongst anime fandom that nothing should ever be edited, ever, was completely unedited and featured boobies, pee-pees, and a bunch of other juvenile, completely hilarious jokes. The comics were very popular too, with more than 4 printings of the early issues topping several hundred-thousand copies. They were so popular that Viz even bundled three or four issues into polybags, and sold them in the mass-market at a slightly discounted price.  They sold them at Toys ‘R’ Us. They sold them in Texas, where a man had to explain to his little kid what boobies and peepees are, and he was none-too-happy about that.

Here’s the CBLDF report about the incident, from March 2000, about the November 1999 event: http://www.cbldf.org/pr/000317-texas-dragballz.shtml

And here’s a reproduction of Viz’s Letter From The Editor in the Dragonball comics in August 2000, about the incident and censorship that followed: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2000-08-21/viz-explains-censorship-in-dragonball-manga

We all got lucky. Oh it made the news of course, and Toys ‘R’ Us pulled every comic book from their chain and have never really gotten back into the comics game. Viz… reacted… to narrowly escaping some very hot water, by editing all future Dragonball releases to remove boobies and peepees and tone down all of the sexual humour. By the time the first Dragonball collected edition came out in 2000, this:

became this:

And a lot of folks (me) whined on the internet. Viz had caved to public perception, and decided the fact that selling tens of thousands of Dragonball collections (at the then-standard 6″ x 9″ size, though at a ‘discounted’ price of just $12.95) was much, much more important than publishing the unedited work, and risking legal troubles. Dragon Ball taught us that sometimes the price of mainstream acceptance was watered-down and disappointing content.

It took a few years, and internet petitions, and letters, but right-around the time Dragonball Volume 4 was released, Viz decided to go back to releasing the work unedited, but with an “Ages 13 and Up” warning label on the cover. Read about it here: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2001-03-09/dragonball-manga-to-remain-unedited.

But apparently that warning label means jack and squat in the real world, when controversy comes-a-courtin’. Which of course is why Dragon Ball’s boobies and pee-pees made waves again THIS year.  In October of 2009, a  County Councilman from Maryland held up photocopies of panels of Dragon Ball at a school board meeting, decrying the work as filth and trying to use it as leverage for his own bullshit political agenda against the school in question (I may be biased). It caused quite a stir across the internet and in particular amongst librarians, with the vast majority of them coming down firmly in support of the work, though it wasn’t enough to stop the book from getting pulled from all of the school and public libraries in the county. Despite the fact that it’s a bestseller, despite the fact it had multiple warning labels, it was pulled from highschool and even public libraries in that county. Pathetic.

Luckily, Viz hasn’t decided to censor the work again and the recent VizBig editions of Dragonball which collect 3 volumes in one oversized edition, are the most faithful and best-reproduced yet, full of colour pages and cheap too! I highly recommend them. But I think this editorial from August, 2000, is still sadly applicable today:

If anyone has any specific questions about what has been changed, or what “originally” happened in a particular place, please write to me about it. Our intentions aren’t to conceal the truth even if we have to conceal Goku’s genitals. We’ll try our best to keep it as true to the original as possible within the boundaries that have been set upon us. Hopefully someday America will be mature enough as a country that Dragon Ball can be printed as it was originally drawn. – Viz Media, August 2000

Yeah, hopefully, someday.

-o+O+o-

#2: Cardcaptor Sakura Pocket Mixx Volume 1, March 2000

Cardcaptor Sakura was one of the earliest and easily the most-anticipated manga released in English by the all-woman manga collective CLAMP, and Tokyopop made it happen. Originally serialized, much like Dragon Ball / DBZ, as a series of issues (in Tokyopop’s “MIXX CHIX” line of comics… hahaha), the first manga trade paperback was released in March of 2000, at the same time as the fourth issue of the serialization, also included in the book. I have a vague recollection of this being unprecedented at the time, the collected edition of a work arriving on THE SAME DAY as the serialization, but then Tokyopop always were ones to break the rules. It’s no wonder they rushed to get a collection out, as Cardcaptor Sakura had been a much-requested favourite of hardcore anime and manga fans for a few years, with huge communities and fan-bases sprung-up around the adorable, fashionable characters thanks to its genre similarities to the Magical Girl manga/anime Sailor Moon. It was the first manga series targeted not at an existing fandom, but at little girls.

Tokyopop’s format and price-point for these collections were shocking to most manga fans–they were tiny and cheap! The “Pocket Mixx” collections as they called them measured only 4.5″ wide by 6.5″ tall, a little more than 2/3 size of regular manga releases, or about 1/2 standard “comic book” size. Smaller than the Japanese size too. But Tokyopop priced them at only $9.99 a pop, for 200 pages of story, and a combination of the price-point, the ‘unique’ size, and the groundbreakingly fresh and original content drew in readers big-time… despite a bunch of bitching about the quality of the printing. Everyone liked to bitch about Tokyopop’s early releases, but man, did everyone buy them. Cardcaptor Sakura Volume 1 was definitely a hit. A small-scale hit, but still noteworthy from a company whose only major success to date had been the Sailor Moon manga, by Naoko Takeuchi, despite a half-dozen other releases. It was later that year that the series would really blow-up.

But before we get into why it was a huge success, lets go back and talk about Dragon Ball for a moment. You might’ve caught, above, that the Dragon Ball comics had been coming out for almost 3 years before the first collection was released in August of 2000. All manga trade paperback releases to that point were similarly slowly paced, and similarly expensively priced. If anything, the release of Dragon Ball Volume 1 at $12.95 could be read as a reaction to the Pocket Mixx pricing, though even then Viz couldn’t match the prices of the Tokyopop material with Viz’s larger book size and higher production costs. A quick survey of the 3 manga trade paperbacks Viz solicited in the same month as Cardcaptor Sakura Pocket Mixx Volume 1 shows their prices at $15.95 for the two adult releases, and $12.95 for the POKEMON release, which was selling like gangbusters at the time anyway. It was a very different industry.

So if Cardcaptor Sakura Volume 1 was not the first Pocket Mixx release, or the first CLAMP release, or the first shoujo release, why am I mentioning it? 3 Reasons:

#1: The Creators. While the success of Rumiko Takahashi in North America had already opened a lot of eyes about the lack of Gender disparity amongst manga creators (particularly as opposed to the male-dominated North American industry), CLAMP was not just 1 woman but 4, all immensely skilled, all trading duties on their manga, and they’d come up from the “junior leagues” of doujinshi to do it. They’re majorly inspiring creators for a generation of girls and women (and guys too!). Though CLAMP’s Magic Knight Rayearth and x/1999 were released a few years prior, they had nowhere near the impact or popularity of Cardcaptor Sakura.

#2: Timing and Audience: While it wasn’t the first shoujo released into North America, or the most popular (this is all post-Sailor Moon remember), it was certainly one of the first, and one of the most successful. With its delicate lines and drawings and exceptionally cute characters and fashions, Sakura’s appeal was clearly aimed at young girls, possibly the first mass-market comic to do so in 30 years, and went allll the way up to creepy 40-something otaku, ensuring a nice broad audience and healthy success. Cardcaptor Sakura was one of the first true moe manga to be released in North America (Google it). It was also the first solo stand-alone title that Tokyopop released after Sailor Moon, giving progressive comic shops (few though they may have been…) something else to sell the die-hard Sailor Moon fans.

#3: It was the title that really started the manga boom in bookstores.

In preparing a little research for this article, I pinged Kurt Hassler, former buyer for Borders/Waldenbooks, unofficial early-days Tokyopop consultant, and currently Editor-In-Chief of YEN PRESS, publishing Japanese manga, Korean manhwa, original English-language manga, and manga-styled other-media adaptations. Hassler is credited with starting the manga boom in 2000/2001, and for guiding numerous manga pubs towards the market we have today. So I flat-out asked Mr. Hassler about the manga-boom on Twitter, cuz he’d be the person to know:

@Comics212 said:  Kurt, what would you say was the most important book you brought to stores in the early days? Fruits Basket? Kingdom Hearts? A work by Clamp?

@YenPress said: Back in the day, Sailor Moon was the book that really paved the way for manga followed by Cardcaptor Sakura & Dragonball. Cartoon Network’s Toonami block opened a lot of doors for manga. It would be nice to see a network devote some afternoon airtime to anime again.

Cardcaptor Sakura, like most popular manga, spawned an anime tv series in Japan. Unlike most of those anime though, the series was brought to North America. It was dubbed, severely edited, and aired on Friday-afternoon TV as CARDCAPTORS. The series premiered on June 17th 2000 on the KidsWB!, a then-young network but with broad, broad reach. Sailor Moon was only ever available in syndication, getting legendarily bad time-slots and had been off-the-air in most markets for a year or two. CARDCAPTORS debut was massive and instant hit with kids (particularly girls), though it wasn’t without some controversy amongst die-hard fans. The North American release of the series started with the 8th episode–where not-coincidentally the male-co-star Li Syaoran finally shows up, to provide both a male and female lead to “better fit American tastes” or something. Almost all of the Sakura-centric episodes were edited out completely, and the action was ramped-up to turn the series into an action-adventure romp for boys… and girls could watch too if they wanted. And man, did this INFURIATE anime fans!!! Check this out: http://www.themanime.org/editorials.php?id=6.

So with Tokyopop releasing monthly Cardcaptor Sakura comics, and trade paperback collections of those comics every 4-6 months, COMPLETELY UNEDITED (but fueled by a popular afternoon TV show!) there was suddenly a rush by hardcore fans AND casual viewers alike to the new, AUTHENTIC releases, which as Mr. Hassler said just happened to be in bookstores everywhere thanks to Tokyopop’s previous successes. It’s important to note that, in my estimation, it was this drive to authenticity that really fueled manga through the 00s, for better-or-for-worse. But we’ll get to that later.

Yes, Sailor Moon opened the door for shoujo manga and anime, and other Tokyopop properties appearing around the same time with anime tie-ins like Gundam Wing definitely had some influence, and hell, Dragon Ball Z was (and is) a much more popular property than all of them combined, but Cardcaptor Sakura was in the right place, at the right time, at the right price-point, in the right format, with the right content, appealing entirely to a fanbase that had been otherwise completely abandoned by comics. Basically, it was the perfect book to launch the bookstore boom (though, honestly, it would take until 2002 or 2003 to really kick into gear).

It’s worth noting that Tokyopop re-released the series of tpbs in the now-standard 5.5×7.5 manga format a few years later, in 2004. Eventually they lost the license to the series due to a dust-up with Japanese licensor Kodansha, and at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con publisher Dark Horse Comics announced that, as part of their partnership with Kodansha and CLAMP, they would be re-releasing Cardcaptor Sakura in new omnibus editions with high-quality printing and a new-translation, just in time for the 10th Anniversary of the series in 2010.

-o+O+o-

Tomorrow: Manga #3 and #4!

– Christopher